The Auroch crashed, and for reasons I didn’t understand, Kusuma showed up. I had my chance but screwed up. He stood right in front of me, and I didn’t stamp his passport. The exact reason for my failure eluded me. I wasn’t scared, so I thought. Did I hesitate at ending a life? Part of it may have been Cecilia. Without realising it, I wanted to protect her. The injury she sustained during the crash made me more scared than being deep in the Dusk.

Without those factors, I may have still failed. I underestimated Kusuma. His magic, as I learned, went far beyond making himself fly. He’d touched the three of us and instantly left us defenceless, floating where he wanted.

But after Kusuma flew away, I used my magic to nullify his. Back on solid ground, I rushed to Cecilia first. She lay face up without rain gear, and the rain may have gotten in her mouth. Entities neared, as well. It may be assumed I had a plan, but in truth, I punched the nearest Entity in desperation. The light and power that burst from my fist, disintegrating about half-a-dozen Entities, came as a total surprise.

After I recovered Cecilia and Victoria, the gang showed up. I’d recognised the vehicles from earlier in the raid. Marshal, Solomon, Ellie, Aoide, and a few others made a show of capturing us. Victoria, stupidly, made a fuss and tried to fight back. She almost made eye contact with me, and it would’ve looked weird if I acted too willing, so on impulse I punched the nearest person in the face. It happened to be Ellie. I should’ve punched Marshal in the gut, or Solomon in his massive jaw, rather than causing Ellie’s nose to gush with blood.

We got loaded into the vehicles and escaped without salt or vegetables.

The gang got back to the main route, before leaving Victoria and Cecilia near the rest of the Auroch convoy. As for me, Marshal made an excuse about revenge for hurting one of their own. To Victoria’s credit—suicidally stupid and brave—she looked just about ready to fight, fists against bullets, but she collected her thoughts and knew she needed to get Cecilia to safety.

I feigned sounds of struggle until we got some distance, wherein I breathed easier. It felt good to be with the gang again. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked Ellie, who bunched her sleeve to her nose.

Ellie, nasally: ‘Why the nose?’

‘I’m sorry.’ I really was. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’ I really wasn’t.

Ellie waved reassurance and draped her clean arm over my shoulder to pull me closer.

I got to chat with Ellie, Marshal, and Aoide in the truck, and then Stefan over the close-range radio. I gave a rundown on what happened in Alderrow, including what Lady Marsh said about the Cult of the Pale Maiden. None of us recognised the Cult’s name, but there was a good chance Umar and Dado would.

I gave updates on the Auroch situation, too, and they talked of if I needed to get extracted from Vandagriff. But, my wishes went unanswered because there wasn’t any reason to believe people would think I was part of the Hunter-Yao gang.

‘Kusuma definitely didn’t like Sergio, but I’m not sure he killed him,’ I said at the end. ‘Sounds like that cult is to blame. I tried to stab him, but he’s fast. Oh yeah, and he destroyed all the vegetables because most of them were filled with something called Phoenix salt.’

The radio crackled. Stefan spoke to someone on his side. His voice came through hushed. ‘I want you to listen closely, Amber: Don’t mention the word “Phoenix” at Vandagriff.’

‘Why?’

‘Because very few people are supposed to know about it. If the wrong people think we know about it, or worse, that we’re interested in it, they’re going to think we’re enemies. Get it?’

‘Got it.’ I had an idea. ‘Hey, since Kusuma didn’t kill Sergio, can I leave Vandagriff.’

‘…’

‘Just a suggestion.’

‘I must finalise some things first, and then we’ll get you out. I promise.’

A promise from Stefan: A thing of rare wonder. Yet, I wasn’t satisfied. ‘You realise he tried to kill three students?’ I said, jaw tight. ‘When he hears we’re safe and happy, is he going to chill and forget it?’

‘He won’t harm you on campus. Stay visible, and we’ll deal with him when the time is right.’

Stefan’s tone meant the discussion had reached a conclusion. I handed the radio back to Aoide and settled against Ellie. I figured it’d be good to not spoil the moment by arguing.

We neared the city, swapped our vehicles, and a couple of the gang brought me to the train station where the excursion group was supposed to arrive. The relevant train only arrived recently, and the students milled around. Luckily, Mr Porter and Mrs Geisler waited for the Auroch, so I only needed to dodge Mr Willigan’s gaze as I eased into the crowd.

When he did eventually spot me, he stormed over and got in my face. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Like, physically?’

‘Don’t mess with me, not now, not ever. You know the kind of ice you’re on? Thin. Paper-thin. You better have a good excuse for why you weren’t in our carriage.’

Yes, I’d better. Yep. I had better. Xandria came to my rescue. ‘I was sleeping,’ I said, parroting Xandria’s words. ‘I apologise for my actions in Alderrow, but it was those same actions that left me dreadfully fatigued, and my peers tend to create a raucous atmosphere, so I sought repose in another carriage.’

‘I checked all the carriages,’ Mr Willigan said.

‘You may not have spotted me, for a kind lady offered me a blanket, which I pillowed under my head and folded in such a way as to cover my face from the sun.’

Mr Willigan’s eyes just about bulged from the sockets. ‘Why’s your hair wet?’

‘…It is raining.’ Water poured around the station.

‘Did I say you could leave this area?’

‘I apologise. I was concerned about my friends. The Auroch should’ve arrived by now.’

I hadn’t spoken like myself, but that was for the best, given Mr Willigan’s loathing. My—Xandria’s excuses came out well, though, and since I already had a punishment incoming for what happened in Alderrow, Mr Willigan must’ve figured that’d be sufficient.

A little while later, the Auroch convoy arrived, Cecilia and Victoria with them. Mrs Geisler rushed them away to get any injuries checked, while the rest of us students returned to the Academy, everyone abuzz with gossip to share about what had happened during the Auroch’s transit.

#

My punishment got enacted that very evening. I was forced to collect my belongings, which filled me with hope at the chance of expulsion. But, that didn’t happen. Not detention, either. Not DetMage duty. Worse. Maybe the worst outcome. They brought me to another room and introduced me to a girl named Lauren Clarke, my new roommate. In Mr Willigan’s words: I needed a positive influence.

The room had the same format as my old one, but duplicated and mirrored. My roommate, Lauren, had kept decorations sparse and unassuming. Some pictures of family, a dog plush, and a poster over her desk of an obscure, old timey band. I read the band’s name aloud:

‘My Chemical Romance.’

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

‘You like them?’ she asked, brightening.

‘I don’t listen to much music.’

‘Oh. What…do you like?’

‘Movies,’ I stated.

She hummed, nodded, and spun her chair back to her desk. Over her shoulder, I spied math equations with more lines and brackets than I found comfortable.

Much like the decorations, Lauren had a sparse, unassuming look: Long, straight blonde hair with loose strands falling over her face, an oval face, black glasses, and thin eyebrows with a noticeable arch at the ends.

I dropped my backpack on the bed and left the room. It occurred to me that the room might no longer get vandalised, assuming my tormentors didn’t have an issue with Lauren.

In the common room, I found Victoria and Cecilia surrounded by students. Everyone wanted to know what happened aboard the Auroch. Victoria gave a detailed account, complete with hand motions and condiment bottles as scaled references. Cecilia mostly said yes or no.

Cecilia caught my eye, pushed through the listeners, jogged over, and threw her arms around me. She smelled nice. The hug lasted a heartbeat. ‘Sorry,’ she said, pulling away. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m good. You?’

She tapped a bandage on her forehead. ‘Not exactly a concussion, but not “not” a concussion.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘What happened after we crashed?’

‘Well…’ I listened to Victoria’s account, as she reached the part where we climbed out of the crashed Auroch. According to her, Entities killed the guards and nearly killed her and Cecilia, but a mysterious mage saved them. Then they got picked up my marauders who, taking sympathy on kids, left them on the main road. ‘That’s pretty much right,’ I told Cecilia. ‘Except I got dropped off in the city.’

‘Why?’

‘I punched one of them pretty hard, so they kept me around and argued if they should hurt me in return.’

Cecilia smiled. I hadn’t seen it before, her smile. She had dimples and bright white teeth. I couldn’t make eye contact with her, so I surveyed the common room.

Someone turned the TV to the news channel and pumped the volume. An interview was underway. My fingers curled into fists. The interviewer spoke to Wira Kusuma. The digital banner on the bottom of the screen read: Plight of Angels.

‘So, Mr Kusuma—’

‘Please, Wira is fine.’

The interviewer tucked hair behind her ear. ‘Wira. Erudite of Flight. Angel of Melbourne. In recent weeks you’ve expressed feelings of guilt over not being able to prevent disasters outside the city. So, with the recent attack on a crop transport coming from the town of Alderrow, have those feelings changed?’

‘If by changed you mean gotten worse, then yes,’ Kusuma replied. ‘I regularly patrol those regions, and for me to fail in such a way, especially when there were children aboard…’ Jaw clenched, he angled his head away and touched a fingertip to his inner eye. ‘Sorry.’

‘There’s no need to apologise,’ the interviewer said, voice all soft and tender. ‘Nobody blames you for what happened. You can’t be everywhere all at once. And knowing the Hunter-Yao gang, they predicted you’d be occupied.’

‘Then, I shouldn’t be so predictable.’

‘What did she say?’ Cecilia asked, with a sudden intensity. ‘Were the bandits from the Hunter-Yao gang?’

‘Apparently,’ I replied.

Cecilia checked her pockets but didn’t remove anything; her fingers curled and uncurled, from claw to fist and back again. ‘Is the media blaming Hunter-Yao, or was there visual confirmation.’

‘I…don’t think anyone’s positive.’

‘Yeah. Good. That makes sense.’ Cecilia’s hands stilled. ‘I still don’t understand how a mage saved us.’

I hesitated, but Victoria swooped to my side and said:

‘The mage came out of nowhere and’—she cupped her mouth to whisper—‘used a new constellation. It destroyed the Entities.’

My heart pounded. I frowned at Victoria, intermingling confusion, fear, and anger. She’d definitely seen me destroy the Entities, but now she covered for me. I wondered about her angle, and the hassle needed to buy her silence. At least only Victoria had witnessed my magic. I didn’t particularly like or trust her, not fully, but I got the sense we could strike an agreement.

Cecilia had zoned out. ‘Sounds like the Man-in-Darkness,’ she mumbled.

‘Sounds like it,’ Victoria agreed. ‘You never know: He might be real.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Not really, I guess. Or, do you…?’

Cecilia shrugged. ‘I’m…’

Victoria nodded. ‘I generally don’t…’

Cecilia raised her eyebrows in acknowledgment. ‘But if you…’

Victoria raised her eyebrows, too. ‘Yes, I…’

What’s going on? I thought, wondering about a new form of deafness that only affected the ends of sentences.

The students who’d listened to Victoria and Cecilia’s story earlier now crowded the couches. A guy plugged a laptop into the TV, while accomplices stood by the hallways to watch for faculty. He yelled for everyone to gather around, before playing a file titled: 00017_NewDiteJusDroppedCOMPx264.avi.

The video played. Based on the angle, it came from the front of the Auroch. A security camera? Blurry footage showed a figure destroying Entities with unknown magic. The figure stood under rain in the Rainy Lands without gear. That figure: Me.

I bit my hand to stifle a gasp.

‘What’s wrong?’ Cecilia whispered.

‘Just…feels weird seeing it again,’ I lied.

Not good. Not good. Why did the Aurochs have cameras? Of course they had cameras! Why hadn’t I thought about that? Of course I hadn’t thought with Entities that close! I needed to tell the gang. They needed to get me out of Vandagriff, or the city. If anybody figured out I was the new mage, I’d be the public founder of an entirely new constellation, new magic, new research, everybody wanting to know how I got it, how it worked, what it could do, what it couldn’t.

‘Whoever this new mage is,’ Bravery Sansing said, ‘I want her to have my babies.’

The guy holding the laptop snorted. ‘That’s a dude.’

‘Dumbass, look at her boobs.’

‘His pectorals, you mean.’

My face grew warm, and grew warmer still when a group of boys, including Bray, took a screenshot, zoomed in, and used rulers or cupped hands to estimate if the pixels curved enough to warrant calling the mage a woman.

Feeling faint, I backed away from the noisy common room, spun, and fast-walked to room 14, only to swear and spin in another direction. That wasn’t my room anymore.

#

About a week after the Auroch incident, as gossip about the chance of new magic reached a peak, I found a note in my pocket. The note detailed instructions to reach an abandoned building near Vandagriff after classes ended. I wouldn’t have gone, but the note had been signed: U&D.

Following the instructions, I reached the building, and found Umar and Dado, the gang’s—how to phrase it? The gang’s scouts? They did more than scouting, though. Spies, assassins, planted agents, they did all the heavy lifting when it came to shadowy information gathering.

Umar had Chamaeleon magic, to cast illusions onto himself. Dado had Cassiopeia magic, shapeshifting, an illegal constellation. Functionally, Chamaeleon and Cassiopeia had a lot of similarities, but the former had more flexibility, while the latter was more convincing.

‘Umar,’ I said, bowing slightly to the man on my left, and then right. ‘Dado.’

‘Inverse,’ they said in unison. Easy to mistake their identity when they rarely looked the same way twice. A lot of the gang weren’t sure they had “original” appearances.

If Umar and Dado had been sent to collect me, the gang must’ve been worried.

We took quiet streets, watching for vehicles, and made it to a safe house, a short apartment block in the amber zone. A few of the gang waited in a loft. A chunk of the roof had caved in, creating a window that faced the inner city. The gang members present: Stefan, Wei, Solomon, Howard, Aoide, and Marshal the Marshal. But, in a rare turn, we’d been joined by Paul DeVeen and Batari Daturbara. I didn’t have much contact with Paul and Batari because they were administrator and treasurer respectively. They kept to themselves at the hideout, busy with…whatever they did.

When Umar, Dado, and I entered, Howard was in the middle of an impromptu, colourful speech:

‘We are fucked. Double-D titty-FUCKED. You smell that? That’s the long dick of the law getting the lube so he can come in here and—’

Solomon rose to his full height. When he didn’t slouch, he was the second tallest member of the gang (only beaten by Gudbrand). ‘Jesus-on-the-cross, Howard, sit down and shut up.’

Stefan cleared his throat and beckoned me forward. I sat on a recliner, joining the loose circle. Umar and Dado seemed to melt into the decorations. ‘Amber,’ Stefan said. ‘I assume you’ve seen it.’ I confirmed; I’d seen the video. ‘Obviously, we don’t blame you. Given Wira Kusuma’s presence, and Entities, you did what was necessary. What we need to know is this: The two girls with you on the Auroch, how much do they know?’

I pondered, tense beneath waiting eyes. ‘One of them doesn’t know anything; she was barely conscious. The other, Victoria…’

‘Victoria F. Fornax,’ Wei said.

‘She knows. B-But she seems to be keeping it secret, for now.’

Wei turned to Stefan. ‘It may be prudent to pre-emptively approach the Fornax family. Establish a reason for them to maintain discretion on the matter.’

Howard loosed a cruel, mocking laugh. ‘They’ll make us their personal hit squad, yeah? Or dangle the threat every time we loot something from them, which in case you haven’t noticed, is pretty much all the time, seeing as this city is a bakery and big daddy Fornax has fingers in all the pies.’

‘Weirdly phrased,’ Aoide said, ‘but not wrong. We’d be at their mercy.’

Wei indicated to Paul and Batari. ‘Do we have the funds to make a definitive offer of silence?’

Batari flipped through an A4-sized, once-white notebook. ‘Estimating the kind of money they’d want, we could, technically. It may cripple us in the process.’

Paul chimed in, chin in palm. ‘The money they could make being vanguards of a new constellation is—they’d call it priceless.’

‘If it comes down to it, there is always “that” option,’ Marshal ventured. ‘Tea, Umar, and Dado: Gold frog special.’

‘No,’ I said, conclusive, with such a tone of vigour it made the group pause. ‘No gold frog special. I can convince her.’

‘Our little wordsmith Amborella isn’t exactly silver-tongued,’ Howard said.

‘I can do it.’ I implored Stefan and Wei, gaze focused on them, the only members of the gang that mattered for that decision. ‘I’ve spent time with her. I’m getting a sense of what she’s about. Give me a week and I’ll make sure she keeps quiet. If I fail…gold frog.’

Stefan and Wei, seated and standing respectively, shared a look, a whole conversation conveyed through facial twitches. In moments like that, I didn’t doubt that they’d known each other for three decades.

‘Very well,’ Stefan said. ‘One week.’