Nobody came to check on me the next day. Nobody, not even Ylde. I got some decent sleep, though, which was nice. I woke up around noon, and I tried to go back to sleep but it didn’t work. My head was pounding. Not for any physical reason, I think. It was just the uncertainty, the unfamiliarity of this whole situation.

I made my way down to the infirmary at four, amazed that I remembered what led where, especially after last night’s fiasco in that club; I’d wandered around for a solid ten minutes before I found my way out. Why’d they have to build these places like goddamn mazes?

The testing itself was pretty similar to that of the previous day, but longer. I met Avia in the lobby and she led me to the surgery center, where there were thick, imposing doors on either side of a long hall, not a window in sight save for the office Avia was leading me to. Inside, there was a giant screen like you’d see on a tablet affixed to the wall. She called in a mage - it wasn’t Helt this time, though that would’ve been a comfort to me; he was a lot more, well, personable than Avia was - and this mage started up the same spell Helt had used last time. I was acutely aware of the ringing in my ears this time, tried to pop my jaw to get it to abate a little.

The tasks seemed random to me, though I’m sure Avia had some fancy reason for administering each of them, and I’m sure she was analyzing every twitch of my fingers, every irregular breath, as I followed the screen’s instructions. Avia kept her eyes glued to her tablet, kept muttering to herself. The tasks weren’t hard - they were comparable to yesterday’s - but the sheer length of the process made it exhausting nonetheless. It was a relief when Avia announced that that’d be enough. The board went dark and the mage disengaged his spell. She dismissed him and called in another surgeon.

She spoke to him in a hushed tone. “We’ve got a point of insertion. Laryngeal motor cortical pathway; a bit of an oddball, this one.”

“Though not unheard of,” the surgeon muttered, leaning over Avia’s desk to get a look at her tablet. I resisted the urge to do the same. “I worked on Dewal; he’s got his in a weird place, too. Posterior parietal cortex.”

Avia put down her tablet. “That’s not too out of the ordinary, actually. Since Dewal, it’s become a lot more common, though still not as common as most points of insertion along the primary motor cortex.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”

“Yeah,” she continued. “I mean, I don’t do much work with post-op mages, but if you look at certain longitudinal surveys it sounds like it makes things a lot more intuitive for mages who exhibit - damn, what was it again? There was a certain condition that -”

“Hey, you tell me. You’re making me feel out of the loop, here.”

“Well, my point is, it’s more common these days. That is, if they ‘feel it’ in their hand, which doesn’t seem to be the case with this one.” She nodded toward me.

“How many spell slots are we looking at?” the other surgeon asked.

“Well, it depends on where on the pathway we put it.” She pointed to a spot on her tablet. “If we put it here, we’re looking at six. Which is good; I mean, five’s the standard, so, you know. However, if we put it here, we can get at least eight, but -”

“Holy shit, eight?”

She glanced up at him. “I mean, we can try for eight, but that makes the retrieval process a lot more volatile. Hasn’t turned out so well in the past; rookie mages get into combat for the first time and they panic, forget everything they know. The chance of retrieving the wrong spell is a lot higher.”

I cleared my throat. “So what’s this mean for me?”

“It means we can go ahead with the procedure once we make a final decision. We could go for two PM tomorrow, but -”

“You mean we’re done?” I interrupted. Felt like there was a rock in my throat. “We’re done with tests?”

She nodded. “Yes, we’re all done.”

The other surgeon turned to her. “Maybe you should leave the decision up to her. Six or eight spell slots.”

“Well?” Avia asked.

“Not sure I know enough about this to say for certain,” I admitted. “I’d rather play it safe, though, stick with six if that’s more stable. But you keep using that term. ‘Spell slot.’ What’s it mean?”

“Basically, it’s a measure of how many spells you’ll be able to carry at one time. A philosopher will be able to assign six to your chip, and may assign different spells to different slots. The slots are numbered, however, and you’ll control each one using a different - how should I say it? - a different feeling, I guess. It’ll be like having a third arm. Or, in your case, a second tongue.”

“Sounds volatile either way,” I said. “I mean, if the way you control it is as abstract as it sounds.”

She nodded in agreement. “You’d think so, but it works for the rest of the mages and it’ll work for you. Especially since you’ll have Kassian training you personally. My point is: it sounds difficult now, but you’ll be a lot better off learning this stuff from a mage than you will from a surgeon who works on mages.”

“Makes sense,” I conceded.

She stood up and tucked her tablet under her arm, and the other surgeon left. “So, is two PM tomorrow okay? Or do the philosophers have plans for you? The recovery period is roughly two weeks, so, while you won’t be totally incapacitated, you will find yourself more lethargic than usual, and you’ll likely have difficulty concentrating on intensive tasks. Tasks like making spells. So you’ll have to work things out with them.”

“Yeah, two’s fine, far as I know.”

“Excellent. I’ll see you then. I’ll walk you to the front.” She led me back through the hallway, and, on our way out, one of those big metal doors swung open. “Oh, excuse me,” Avia muttered as she wove to avoid it. I couldn’t really see inside, but the girl in the doorway looked like she’d been through a blender. Her walk was stiff, her face shell-shocked. There were bandages around her head. Her arms were shaking, her hands tightened into claws. There were two nurses assisting her, helping her keep her balance as she shambled behind us. I had to resist the urge to stare; I kept my eyes on the door ahead and shuddered at the thought of being fucked up like that.

When I got back to my quarters, I found Klia standing at my door. “Klia?” I inquired.

She spun to face me. “Oh, good. I thought I got the wrong room number. So it is twenty-two. You got one of the nicer ones; you’re lucky.”

“So I’ve been told,” I replied.

“I came to tell you that I’ve - well, I’ve selected you as an apprentice.” She gave me a warm smile. “I look forward to teaching you.”

“And I look forward to learning from you.” My tone wasn’t convincing, and I saw her smile falter. I mean, I did, on a certain level, look forward to learning from her. On the other hand, I was too wrapped up in what I’d just seen - that girl in the hallway; would that be me? - to look past tomorrow. “When do we start?”

“Anytime you want, though that time would, preferably, be soon.”

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I looked down the staircase, back at the elevator door. “I think I’ll be out of commission for the next two weeks. I’m getting my chip implanted tomorrow. Dr. Eindiss says I should lay low for a while.”

“Avia? Well, I suppose I can’t argue with her,” she confessed. “I am hosting an introductory lesson of sorts tomorrow in my room - thirteen, right over there - and I was hoping both you and Junae could be there. It’s at two, if you can make it.”

“That’s when, you know -”

“Oh,” she whispered. “I can push it back, if you want, make it eleven or so.”

I was about to tell her that even eleven might be a little close, but after the restless hours I’d suffered before going in to Avia’s office today, I figured I’d appreciate having something to do in the morning besides wait in my room and poke at my collection of books - mostly non-fiction, I’d found out, relating to magic and Condouth and all the Independent Cities between the elves’ territory and the sea - and suffer option paralysis at the assortment of ingredients in my fully stocked fridge. “Yeah, eleven works.”

Her smile widened again. “Great! Oh, and, well,” she started, leaning in, “I do hope the surgery goes smoothly for you tomorrow. It can be scary, but Avia knows what she’s doing; she and her team are the best. Never in my career have I ever heard of a botched chip implantation.”

I backed up slightly. “That’s a comfort to know.”

“So,” she inquired, “see you tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” I confirmed.

“Then it’s settled! Bring your tablet.” She did this weird little dance as she walked away. I think it was out of genuine excitement. She wanted to teach us, so caught up in the art of what she was teaching that she forgot to consider the reason she was teaching it. Or maybe she willingly chose to ignore that reason; the way she handled Junae’s belligerence would suggest it.

But anyway, that night was rough. You find, when it’s up in the air, that you think you’re ready for surgery. But when you set a date, when you know what’s going to happen and you know precisely when, all that changes. I was paralyzed on the bed all night. And the abject fear of the imminent intrusion, the violation of my most vital organ was overwhelming. It fucks you up. You’ve been there, I imagine; you were there the night before your transition. They tore into both our brains, mine when I got my chip implanted, yours when you moved bodies. How does it feel, knowing your cerebellum was not originally your own?

Okay, maybe that’s a cruel question. And maybe I can’t claim to relate to you in this way, since the shit you went through was a lot more invasive than what I endured. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t experience the chills, the heightened senses that come with the fear that they might fuck up. If the doctor, I dunno, sneezes when she’s cutting into your shit, you know, you might never feel anything ever again. I mean, Avia’s a pro, and her team is as good as they get, but I didn’t know that, and they hadn’t exactly made me feel at home, and even if they had, I still would’ve been nervous. As I’m sure you were.

Needless to say, I regretted agreeing to go to Klia’s thing in the morning. She gave us the rundown of the basics of rune sequencing, which we knew anyway; otherwise, we wouldn’t be where we were, would we? She had us practice making a disembodied voice say various random phrases, had us moving the point of contact around the room, made sure we put the right runes in the right order - always specify the point of contact before the spell’s primary sequence, you know, and specify any directional parameters, plus the radius, if applicable, and any other dependencies - and she made sure we knew how to reference an existing spell outside of our own tablet’s database. You can broadcast a composite rune, in a sense, without actually executing the spell on that rune, and anyone who knows the rune’s design can incorporate it into a spell of their own. That’s where the voice we were using came from; it was all prerecorded.

Junae was surprisingly compliant throughout the lesson; she followed Klia’s instructions to the letter, and more quickly than I could’ve, stressed about my surgery and all. “Good work,” Klia whispered as Junae completed the final exercise; mine came soon after. It was soulless work. I was quiet.

“You all right? Raena?” Klia asked.

“What?” I blurted, startled. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

“You look a little out of it. Understandably.”

“I’m fine,” I assured her. I wasn’t fine.

She gave me a concerned look but spoke of it no further. “Well, that’s about it for my lesson plan today. Clearly you’ve each had a bit of experience. You’ll be taking commissions from the King and the Army - well, Raena, you are the Army, though you’re just as much one of us - in no time. Why don’t we plan on meeting in the workshop tomorrow, same time? The tablets in the workshop are more versatile, and the wards around it are thick. In there, we can work with spells that would otherwise be dangerous. Although, Raena, if you need your rest, don’t let me interfere.”

“I’ll see how I feel tomorrow,” I said. “I likely won’t be able to join, though.”

She nodded. “No worries. I’ll contact you an hour or two ahead of time to check in. Don’t feel pressured to answer.”

“Got it,” I noted. “And thanks.”

Junae was already on her way out. I followed, giving Klia an appreciative smile. “See you tomorrow, Junae,” Klia called.

“Yep, see you,” she called back hastily.

As soon as I shut the door to Klia’s quarters behind me - which were similar to mine, by the way, save for the sun being in your eyes all the time and the glaring lack of a piano - Junae grabbed me by the shoulders. “Are you really okay with what they’re gonna do to you tomorrow?”

I grimaced. “What do you think?”

“So you’re not, is what you’re saying.”

“Not what? Not okay?” I repeated. “No, I’m not okay, it’s fucking terrifying.”

“Then don’t go through with it.” Her eyes dug into mine.

I scoffed. “So what do I do? What do you expect me to do?”

“I can get us out of here, and they won’t know we left until it’s too late. I know a way.”

I stared at her. “God, you’re not fucking around, are you? All that lip you gave Klia and Jorg, that wasn’t all talk.”

“No,” she confirmed. “It wasn’t.” I could see now that she was shaking a bit, could feel the twitching of her thumbs as they grasped my shoulders. “I mean to leave this place. Been talking with a mage who wants to leave, too.”

“Why risk telling us?”

“Out of all of us, you have the most reason to make a run for it.” She glanced to the side. “You, new mages; you’ve got more incentive to run than I do, and I’m miserable.” Something about that last bit didn’t sit right with me. I wasn’t exactly happy to be here either, but “miserable” is not the word I would’ve used. No, misery is a very specific sort of thing, something I didn’t associate with, well, everything I saw around me. You could be unhappy, but you couldn’t be miserable among this sort of decadence.

I made a nervous scan of the hall, made sure there were no prying ears. “Why bring us with you at all, though? Why take that risk, is what I’m asking.”

She sighed. “Because it gives the decision validity. I don’t know. It just feels better, if I’m not doing it alone.”

I brushed her hand off my shoulder. “Look, I’m gonna need details. I can’t just go with you ‘cause you say you know a way; I’ve gotta see it.”

“Shh!” she snapped. Jorg, alongside a philosopher I didn’t recognize, passed under the balcony and we froze. Junae waited until they were out of earshot. “Come on.” She shot a wary look at Jorg and his friend as they disappeared into the elevator at the far end of the room. “I’ll fill you in.” She started down the stairs and I followed close behind as she led me to her quarters. Anyone who saw us probably thought we were hooking up or something, with all our clandestine whispering. Which was when I stopped and considered: was it even illegal for philosophers to leave? I mean, I’d assumed it was illegal. But it occurred to me in that moment that I didn’t actually know.

The thing is, nobody’d ever given me a choice. They brought me here and they told me what would happen, but they hadn’t explicitly told me what would happen if I left. Which, in turn, got me thinking: yeah, I’d unlocked the runes on my tablet; and yeah, I’d killed someone. And Thuli had stolen a fully functional spell-making tablet, a crime not taken lightly. I imagined a lot of the philosophers were in the same boat. So would we be put on trial, given a prison sentence - or death - like anyone else, if we ran? Was that how they kept idealistic philosophers like Junae from jumping ship, by making them feel like they got off easy?

It’d make sense; so no, I figured, maybe it wasn’t technically illegal for philosophers to leave, but most of them had done some shit they weren’t supposed to do using spells they weren’t supposed to have access to, which makes it easy for the King to say, “You know what? We’d usually put you in prison for this and force you to make cheap shoes, but instead, we’re gonna put you in the palace and force you to make spells, ‘cause it’d be a shame to waste the skills that got you in trouble in the first place.” And I thought that made a lot of sense.