What do you do with an offer like that? Junae decided to trust me without hesitation. Told me her whole plan. She said some of the lower offices - belonging to the small-time beaurocrat types, the kind who didn’t have to meet with the King on a daily basis - had panic rooms, and that these rooms all bordered the hollow center of the palace. She said there were air ducts you could crawl through, make your way from one of the panic rooms to this wide open shaft and climb down the scaffolding, or belay down if you had a long enough rope. And when you reached the bottom, you’d find yourself in the sewers, which could lead you just about anywhere in Condouth.

So, of course, my first question was, “How do you know this?”

“I have an uncle who works down there; we pay him a visit, find some reason for him to leave for just a moment or two,” she assured me. “I know the code to the panic room.”

“And why do you know the code?”

She clenched her jaw. “I’ve spent time in his office before. He’s shared the code with me in case of emergency.”

“So you’re getting all this information from your uncle?” I demanded. “Okay, and what’s stopping us from just walking out the front door? Sure, we get far enough out into the city, they get suspicious about our intent, but it’s better than going through all that.”

“Because,” she started softly, “They won’t let Nie through. She just had her surgery yesterday. Nothing I could do to stop it.”

“Who won’t let her through?” I inquired. “They keep new mages under lock and key?”

She turned away. “She can’t leave the mages’ wing. But they’ll listen to a philosopher. They’ll make an exception. It’s happened before: a philosopher befriends a mage and they go parading around the palace, and nobody asks questions because one of them is wearing this.” She pulled a small gold pin out of her pocket, the rune for “amplify” etched onto its surface. Wasn’t effectively a spell, since it didn’t specify what was being amplified and by how much.

“What is that?”

“They won’t tell you that you have this, but it’s in a small box in the drawer at the base of your bed. Look for it. You wear it, it lets everyone know that you’re a philosopher.” She spun it around, ran her fingers over its crevices. “The mages standing guard? They see this and they let you through. Gets you wherever you want to go. Of course, it won’t get you everywhere; you hit the bubble with a new mage in tow, you raise some eyebrows. They’d round us up and make sure Nie gets back to where she belongs. So we’ve got to find another way.”

I tried to catch her eye. “You’re ashamed. You don’t want people to know that you know the palace so well. What’s your uncle do?”

“Works down in the -”

“I know where he works,” I interrupted. “What’s he do?”

She sighed. “He’s head of air traffic control.”

“He keeps dragons from flying into each other? They seem pretty capable of doing that themselves,” I noted. “I mean, mechanical vehicles are one thing, but -”

“Yeah,” she explained, “but that doesn’t matter, not right now. I want you to come with me.” Her eyes flicked to mine and back away. “Please. Nie’s not doing well, not after her surgery, and I don’t know if I have the strength to carry her on my back all the way down the central shaft, and -”

I saw tears start to form in her eyes. “So that’s why you want me to come with you? To carry your friend for you?” Silence. “Your girlfriend?”

“I want you to come with,” she started as she, ineffectively, tried to dry her eyes without me noticing that there’d been tears there in the first place, “because we’re stronger as three than we are as two. And Iannik and Thuli, they don’t get it. They don’t get that, under a system like this, the King doesn’t need a reason to fuck with you, just a sponsor. But I feel like you get it. And I’m not gonna waste this chance. I finally have the chance to up and leave, the chance to get out of the King’s shadow, out from under my uncle’s wing, out from -”

I scoffed and felt a half-smile creep involuntarily onto my face. “Oh, so that’s what this is really about. Rebelling against your rich uncle. Okay.”

“That’s not -”

“And look: Thuli and Iannik do get it. You didn’t hear a word of what Thuli said the day before yesterday, did you?” I felt my face growing hot. “About how she stole a tablet? About what she feared would happen? Don’t you fucking dare mistake their compliance for anything other than it is. They’re making the best of a bad situation, okay? They don’t endorse shit. And neither do I. Look, hey, look at me.” She looked up, her eyes brimming with tears again. “You, you’re a rich kid. You don’t get it. You’re never gonna get it. Before all this happened, before they dragged us here: if I do something wrong, take a guess what happens to me. If you do something wrong, your uncle slides a few bits the King’s way and you never hear about it again.”

“So I take it you’re not coming with?” she asked quietly.

“No. I think your plan is tenuous at best. You know that they can track your girlfriend’s chip, right? They’ll find her in an instant and, by extension, find you.” I stood up from my chair, preparing to leave her quarters.

“If it can be tracked, it can be hidden.” She persisted, but she knew I was beyond persuasion. Didn’t stop her from trying to convince me she knew what she was doing, though, maybe out of pride. “I’ve already done that part. Got the code to Nie’s chip when I visited her in the infirmary earlier today; doctor set his tablet down and I got him to leave us alone for a few seconds. The number was right there on the screen. After that it was just a matter of getting briefly into the workshop, where I set Nie’s chip to appear as if it’s in her quarters, regardless of where she actually is.”

“I’ll give credit where credit’s due: that’s some pretty fancy spellwork,” I admitted. “And I genuinely wish you best of luck, but I won’t be coming with you. I don’t want to go through with the surgery but I just can’t take the risk of running away. It could be my life on the line if I do; I’m sure you understand.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Yeah, I understand.” She stood up, took my hand. “I can trust you not to tell anyone about this, right? I don’t think anything bad will happen to me, with my uncle and my philosopher status and all, but Nie . . .”

I grimaced. “Yeah, no, not a word from me.” I withdrew my hand and started toward the door. “Gotta ask, though: how’d you end up here in the first place? You’ve obviously had extensive experience with magic before this, so -”

“My uncle,” she muttered, “he put me in a program early on. Prepped us to be philosophers, guaranteed us a place in the palace.”

I laughed sardonically. “Never heard of anything like that before.”

“Real secretive, yeah,” she confirmed, “though not technically a secret. It’s the sort of thing you only know about if you know the right people, and my uncle, well -”

“He knew the right people.”

She nodded. “Exactly.”

We bid each other adieu and I was alone again, alone and preoccupied with the surgery to come. As I watched the clock draw closer to two, I considered going back to Junae’s quarters and saying, “Fuck it, I’m coming with you.” But that didn’t happen; no, that would’ve actually required me making a fucking decision for once. So I found myself back in that sterilized lobby again, found myself following Dr. Avia back down that hallway. She guided me into one of those dark rooms with the thick doors and gestured for me to sit down in a chair that sat at the center of the area. Its color was a sickly green, and the spindly scaffolding underneath the seat - as well as the translucent tarp that extended from a rig on the ceiling down to the top of the chair, where there was a hole where my head would go - was sending off a thousand little pinpricks of light under the stark, clinical overheads.

Avia guided me into the chair and told me to relax. Outwardly, I might’ve seemed compliant but I was gripping the edges of the chair, hard, feeling like if I were to stand up right then there would be no floor to stand on. I felt like I was capsizing backwards, like I was over an immense pit.

“Prepare a general anaesthetic,” Avia ordered.

“But ma’am -” someone protested, out of my sight.

“Don’t ask questions, not now.” Her gaze was firm upon me, her eyes shadowed by her prominent forehead. “We’re putting this one to sleep.”

The thump of swift footsteps echoed up from the hard floor. “At least you could offer some sort of explanation. Both for her sake and the sake of the team.”

“Just do it,” she snapped. Cold dread arced from my head to my stomach. Something was fucked about this, and they weren’t even trying to hide it. I squirmed; I stammered something incoherent and Avia put her hand on my shoulder, her grip firm. “Shh,” she ordered. “You’ll wake up from this. I’ll make sure of it.”

A moment later, there was another figure next to her pressing a mask to my face. I was caught between breathing in short gasps and trying not to breathe at all. “Beginning preoxygenation,” I heard from behind me. There was more like that, back and forth, quickly becoming unintelligible as I lost consciousness. So many voices, spouting procedure; so many hands holding my then-delicate life.

And then there was another voice. “Raena, I have a question for you.”

It was Helt. “Oh, thank God,” I muttered. I couldn’t feel my lips and my speech was almost involuntary. “Thank God you’re here; you’re gonna get me out, right?”

“No,” he said, his voice full of genuine dismay. “I’m not here to get you out. I just have a question for you.”

“Ask away,” came a lilting voice that wasn’t entirely mine.

“I’m gonna need you to tell me where Junae is.” I paused. I could trust this guy, right? He was one of us, in a way. One of who? “Raena?” I’d made some kind of promise. “A friend of yours is getting herself into some deep shit, and you’re just gonna let her? Now, I need you to tell me where she’s gone.”

“She’s gone . . .” I started.

“Yes? Gone where?”

“She’s gone . . . she’s going down the middle of the . . . she’s climbing in the . . .” I couldn’t finish my sentence; I was too far gone.

“Climbing what?” he interrogated.

“The middle . . . the palace . . .”

There was a brief silence. “The central supports?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I murmured.

Next thing I knew, I was waking up in that same chair, my head throbbing and my limbs stiff. I didn’t remember Helt’s visit, and I wouldn’t for a while. An attendant guided me up out of my seat. I could barely walk, and when I tried to talk there was a sort of, well, not quite pain; it was like a blockage, like someone had tied a knot somewhere on the path between my tongue and any words I tried to conjure.

I was moved back to the room where I’d first woken up in the palace, maybe even the same bed. I stayed there for a couple hours, nauseated and, honestly, bored. I let my fingers slide up the left side of my head - the primary source of the throbbing - and, my fingertips grazing the gauze, I could feel a narrow, mild protrusion, like a mountain range on one of those 3D topographical maps. I was moved back to my quarters eventually, and by then I could feel my words returning. Sending nervous glances toward the door, for fear anyone might hear me, I vocalized randomly, just letting any noise that might occur to me escape my throat.

There was something new about my voice. Something weightier. Something more substantial. Or maybe that was still just the lethargy of the surgery, making it so that every movement was a little more difficult and therefore felt a little more significant. But this feeling didn’t last long; by the time Ylde came to check up on me, noting that he’d serve as a messenger between me and the medical wing if I so desired, and Klia came to express her heartfelt sympathies - while ogling the bandages that concealed what I’m sure she imagined was an unspeakable horror - I was talking normally again, save for the occasional hitch.

I waited two days, as advised, to take the bandages off. I’d traced that protrusion endlessly; it felt wrong to feel it in such vivid clarity, to feel the individual staples among the prickly layer of hair that was starting to return. The headaches were gone, and the scar, which I had more or less gotten used to, became once again a symbol of how deeply my autonomy had been breached. A flush of anger came and passed in less than a second. I couldn’t afford to be angry.

I’d been told it’d be a couple weeks before I was back on my feet, resuming my training; I was up in a couple days. I met regularly with Klia, who made no mention of Junae during lessons. It was all business with her. I figured she was scared to talk about Junae’s escape attempt. She set me to recreating a good portion of the mages’ arsenal of attacks in the workshop as practice: spouts of fire, beams of light that could cut straight through flesh, sudden changes in pressure that could cause a person’s ribcage to burst, that sort of thing. There were no mages to assist us; everything was being cast directly from the console on which we were working, a giant tablet-like plateau that was affixed to the floor. There were a number of these throughout the workshop, but only one console could send spells to the test room at a time, a big white chamber behind a thick wall of glass.

The dummies we used were disturbingly realistic, and I don’t know which was worse: watching my spells tear them apart or watching the pulp congeal back into recognizable forms with every reset. After a couple days of this, I realized it was all for show. Not the training, no; Klia wasn’t trying to prove anything. The weapons themselves were inefficient, messy. You want to kill someone with a spell, I thought to myself, all you’ve got to do is tear them up on the inside. Boom, brain hemorrhage, no cleanup. Or some equally invisible method, though I’m sure you can guess why a brain hemorrhage was the first thing to occur to me.

But what this meant, I figured, was that these spells were weapons of terror. Didn’t mention my thoughts to Klia; it was a little uncomfortable how desensitized she was to this shit, and I was already sure enough of my conclusion not to need her confirmation. She’d probably obscure it anyway, give some long-winded and intellectualized defense of our methods. What I did eventually muster the courage to ask, though, is what she knew of Junae’s absence. “Gotta wonder, where’s Junae been?” was all I asked, for fear of giving anything away.

I was met with a deep frown. “She’s not in a good way right now,” she said, her tone hushed. “I expect you to offer her your full support when she returns to lessons.”

“So is she still here? Or -”

Klia closed the spell we were working on. “What do you mean? ‘Here’ as in the palace?”

I turned away. “Nevermind. I just thought maybe something bad had happened, you saying that like you did. Was worried.” That had been enough. I’d gotten my answer. Junae had failed.