Eating this sandwich, chips, and salad felt like that. A chocolate bar sat at the desk to their room and Lucy didn’t even want it that much. This was only day two of the post-Bristow dining.
Verona lay in bed on her stomach with her legs kicking, no doubt getting crumbs on the sheets or the book she was reading as she ate and went over a textbook at the same time.
“I’m glad we don’t have a full semester of this,” Lucy said.
“Wha?” Verona asked, twisting around. “Huh?”
“Food? Eating like this?”
“It’s fine. We’re fine. Don’t be a wimp.”
Lucy looked around for something to throw at Verona that wasn’t so lightweight it could be ignored or so heavy it would do serious harm. “I’m not being a wimp, I bet even Ted Havens would sigh as he had to eat this bland, weirdly dense bread.”
“Is he really the guy you’re comparing yourself to?” Verona asked, flipping over to lie on her back.
“If not him, who? An Other? If we’re talking about eating awful food, then… a goblin? I don’t want to compare myself to a goblin. Or a-”
She remembered Musette, two nights ago. Her good humor faltered.
“I mean, Ted works,” Verona replied. She adjusted the positioning of textbook and food. “It means I can say I might be superior to Ted. He might have lived for thousands of years, but my experiences of eating freezer-burned leftovers and frozen dinners have made it so I don’t give a crap about food. I win against you and the Ted we’re imagining.”
“If you can call that winning,” Lucy said, humor returning.
“I can call it whatever I damn well please.”
“You know I sleep on that bed too, right? You’re getting crumbs-”
“That Avery?” Verona asked.
“Zed,” Lucy said, holding her ham and bland sandwich with one hand and poking at her phone with the other. “We’ve got you on speaker.”
“On our way back. We’re taking the long way, to be safer and steer clear of some locals. We probably won’t make it back for afternoon class.”
“Sorta figured. What locals?”
“Three incarnations came after us. Jess had an escape route ready, but it was close. I’ll let Avery share the deets later. We wanted to let you know all is well. A bit tired, but well.”
“Great to hear,” Lucy said, leaning back.
“I have some requests to pass on. We were talking about who might be your primary focus before you go. My advice was that you might want to focus on those who would actually take the time and make the effort, ignoring everyone who might be powerful and upset, but ultimately irrelevant once they go home.”
“We might come back here, right?” Verona asked.
Lucy made a face at Verona.
“You might. You can deal with it then. But when you have limited time…”
“It’s like Clementine said,” Lucy finished. “Gotta clean up the biggest, most necessary messes, when you have someone coming over. Right, okay. Which leaves the question who.”
“We talked about that too. We can expand on this list later, but for now, part of what I’m passing on is a recommendation: steer clear of the Tedds, and stay away from the Belangers. Nicolette excepted, of course.”
“Belangers are weirdly positioned right now.”
“They’re not bound by a lot of obligations or alliances, they had big stakes, I sorta know Wye, Chase, and Tanner, and I really don’t know what they’ll do.”
“So those things bundled together are numero uno. Number two? Can you throw a cold drink at Verona on Avery’s behalf?”
“I can, but she’s lying on a bed I sleep in. How deserving of this is she?”
“Checking- not that deserving. She says a smack across the head would suffice.”
Lucy stood, and Verona shielded her head for a few seconds until Lucy could find an angle to give her a sharp swat. Verona cackled through her sound of pain.
“Done. What did she do?” Lucy asked.
“Misled Brie and I about what we were talking to Avery about. Or who we were talking to Avery about. Again, I’ll let Avery explain. Gotta wrap this up.”
“Can you put her on?”
“I can, but calling from this far away burns through battery, and my spare battery was in a device that got a giant arrow put through it.”
“I’ll keep it short.”
But a second later, Avery spoke, “Hullo?”
“This is tough but I’m glad I did it. Learning a lot. What did I miss this morning?”
Zed said something audible in the background.
“Not much. Elemental rune stuff we already knew. Refresher. This afternoon is the guest teacher.”
“Okay, I had a third request Zed didn’t get to. Can you take good notes for this afternoon?”
“Of course. Was going too anyway. Listen, uh, this is awkward…”
“Just wanted to say I miss having you around and stuff. Glad you’re doing this, hope it’s doing what you need it to, but I’ll be glad when you’re back.”
“Me toooo!” Verona raised her voice, cupping her hands. “Averyyyy! We love youuu! Snowdrop toooo!”
There was a hiccup of a chuckle from Avery’s end in response that suggested she’d heard.
“Now unless there’s more Zed wanted, you should hang up,” Lucy said, stern. “Leave some charge on his magic battery in case of emergency.”
“Yep,” Avery said. There was a pause. “Thanks. Means a lot.”
“Recharging her Self?” Verona asked.
“Sure. And I wanted to make sure she knows.”
Lucy slid the phone around the desk a bit, poking at it to check other messages. Her last message from her mom was that thing about Verona’s dad. Matthew had sent a short list of who they’d invited in, why, and the rules they’d put into place to keep things manageable with the influx.
Something to think about more seriously later, when they were heading home. It was a long drive, they’d be able to talk it over then.
Lucy finished the sandwich, wet a napkin, and cleaned up the desk of crumbs. Then, after weighing the options of saving the chocolate bar for later, knowing the opossum or one of her roommates might get it, decided to eat it.
With her earring, she could hear the sound of doors opening and closing, and footsteps in the hallway. She checked the time.
“Want to go learn about elementals?” Lucy asked.
It was tough, heading out into the hallway. The eyes that were immediately on her, combined with the fact that they were in the room at the far end of the hallway, so a lot of those eyes that were staring at her were between her and the room they were walking to… something she had to walk into and through. She could see Liberty in that crowd, not smiling, and she could recall the warning they’d just got.
The fact it was tough, weirdly, was the worst thing about it. Lucy, all her life, had dealt with assholes. She’d marked, even from a young age, that some people would be vaguely jerk-ish to her -if not total a-holes- and then be nice to the next random person her age. More often, there was a vague sense that the world was a hostile place, that things were hard, and question marks were stamped all over everything. Why was this person giving her a hard time? Why did that guy pick her to bully and keep in the water? Why had Logan given her a hard time? Why had Mr. Bader had an issue? Why had Paul left? Alone, any one of those things was a maybe, or even a likely, and putting it all together she could be reasonably sure that the color of her skin was the primary reason why. But those question marks still got to her, made it hard to call any one thing out, frustrated.
And she liked to think she stood tall through it, she picked her clothes with care, she learned hair and makeup through a hundred hours of tutorials and videos. Was still learning. She called out what she could and she didn’t let stuff slide.
It made this hard. When she was tired and she’d just eaten a lunch that had supplied basic nutrition and less than zero joy. When she’d seen violence very real, a man’s head cracked open, just nights ago, and hadn’t slept great ever since. When she felt far from safe, far from any backup that wasn’t her friends. When it felt like all of that prep and those safeguards weren’t helping like they normally might.
When she didn’t feel like she was standing tall, emotionally.
Verona nudged her. Lucy looked over at her friend.
Some of the students who’d left during the event still hadn’t returned. The Driscolls, Scobie, Rowsome… but at the same time, the fact that there was only one option for classes meant that everyone was heading in the same direction, albeit at different speeds. They didn’t really enter the bigger group so much as they got absorbed by the stragglers.
They reached the student lounge, and the slight bottleneck as other teenagers stopped and figured out where they were sitting. Lucy leaned against the wall and looked over to where Sol Ferguson sat in the lounge. He looked restless but he didn’t rise to his feet, either.
“How’re you doing, Sol?” Lucy asked.
“Not looking forward to this afternoon,” he said.
“Redundant?” Verona asked. “Elementals class, and you’re the elemental explosion guy.”
“That too,” he said. He stood, making grumbling sounds, and stretched.
She remembered reading the student guide and feeling sorry for Sol. The only twelve year old. A bit too young to fit in among the teenagers, pushed into a younger age group by the fact his roommate was ten. But he was Lucy’s height, lanky, with superfine blond hair that looked a bit like it was always suffering from bedhead or light static. He’d put some gel or something in it but he did that thing that guys did when they were first doing their hair and concentrated on the parts at the front that they saw when looking in the mirror, ignoring the back. He was wearing a shirt with a stylized graffiti orange-on-black pattern on it, and had tattoos at his hands- a half circle on each hand, each filled with diagram stuff.
If there were students out there who weren’t glaring at them or hating them for intervening like they had, then Lucy wanted to use that. Getting rid of enemies was important, but making friends didn’t hurt either.
“What’s got you down?” she asked.
He walked over, then peeked around the corner, pointing before retreating.
At the stage was a woman with very fine dark brown hair, skinny, with tattoos all down her arms, each of a partial diagram. Her dress was a crimped fabric, red at the shoulders and blue near the ankles, with unnecessary brassy buttons up near the collar.
“That bad?” Lucy asked.
“Would you want your parents teaching?”
“That would be a sight to behold,” Verona mused. “Plop my dad down on the stage. Get him to teach something about designing ticket systems for management branches and how the right implementations can encourage good workplace habits, and blah blah blah.”
“I think he’d run instead of teaching,” Lucy said.
“Well yeah, but it’s trippy to think about. And awful.”
“This is awful,” Sol muttered, glancing around the corner. “I can’t skip a class my mom’s teaching, can I?”
Lucy made a ‘hmmm’ sound, before venturing, “I don’t think I’d want to get on the wrong side of the kind of woman who tattoos a twelve year old so he can blow stuff up by putting his hands together.”
Sol sighed. “Yeahhhh. I was ten, by the way.”
“Is this a Talia type of situation?” Verona asked. “Scary mom?”
“Very scary, but not at all like Talia’s.”
Durocher entered the classroom from the western hallway, and the murmur of conversation changed, dropping in volume by half, then by half again, just a second or two later.
Mrs. Ferguson clapped her hands. “Everyone, if you’d please take your seats!”
Durocher walked partway up the stairs, and gave Mrs. Ferguson a hug, before they exchanged kisses on the cheeks.
“Ohhh, she’s close to Durocher,” Verona commented. “Cheeky-kissy close.”
“Yeahhh,” Sol groaned the word.
“Does that give a hint about what kind of teacher or mom she is?”
“Nooo,” Sol groaned out the word.
Things were quieting down enough for class to start, so Lucy entered the room. She, Verona, and Sol sat down on the first available bench, toward the back.
“Mrs. Durocher is going to be sitting in and observing, apparently? That’s a thing you’re doing this year?” Mrs. Ferguson asked, looking around. “Okay! I’m Mrs. Ferguson.”
Sol dropped his face into two waiting hands with enough force it made an audible sound.
“Those of you who have been attending for a while may remember me from two years ago, I did a week-long series after a Storm not too far from here. I’m a career elementalist, semi-retired adventurer-hyphen-explorer, mercenary, monster hunter, writer of two textbooks, consultant for police on weird events they’d rather not get involved with, and, of course, most challenging of all, I’m a mom.”
Sol lifted up his face and smacked it down again.
“Careful you don’t, um, connect that diagram on your hands,” Verona murmured.
“This is the first year I get to teach a class with my son attending. Sol!? Where are you? Looking through the benches, Sol? Sol! Solarisse Blaze Ferguson, I hope you’re in this class!”
Sol sat up and put his hand up.
“There you are!” his mom gushed. “Come on, come up to the front, you can help with the class. I hope you haven’t been having so much fun you’ve forgotten everything you know.”
Virtually every pair of eyes on the class was on Sol as he rose to his feet, circled around to the aisle, then walked down, head a little bent.
Cringing a little, Lucy distracted herself by getting her book and pen out.
“I…” Mrs. Ferguson said, touching the edge of her palm to a partial diagram on her arm-
A violent blast of wind scattered papers all across the room, made students lose their pens and pencils, and made pages flip in books and notebooks that sat open throughout the retrofitted church.
“Love…” she touched another portion of her arm.
A geyser of flame shot through the middle of the room, over the heads of students who were already ducking low.
“Elemental practice!”
The third point of contact produced a spray of water. Droplets reached Lucy, moisture dotting the page she had just opened.
Mrs. Ferguson touched a point near her wrist, then drew her hand up her arm- white lines spelled out more diagram, spreading up to the shoulder, and with them, lightning crackled out around her. She touched a point at her shoulder, and it all fizzled out.
Students flinched as she switched hands, touching her right arm with her left hand, instead of her left arm with her right hand. A humanoid figure made of light flickered into existence.
“I love elementals,” Mrs. Ferguson said, smiling all the while. She turned to the Other. “Stay put.”
The figure, mid-step, hesitated, then planted its feet, remaining still.
“Shamanistic practices are struggling with a modern paradigm shift. Technomancy is modern but has no roots. But elemental practices have been around from an early era, and we’re still going strong today. We may even be stronger. Yay for global warming, am I right, Sol baby?”
“Yeah,” Sol stood with his back to the stage, his mother a few feet behind him. He sounded and looked like he wanted to die.
“As mankind harnesses the elements, earth, air, fire, water, and all of the derivative elements, like electricity, cold, smoke, wood, and iron, the Others change. In my grandmother’s generation, it was more common for elementals to resemble animals, but now they resemble men and women, old and young. The balances of power change, as electricity reigns triumphant. They take on new flavors. Polluted water, radiation, acid rain. Elementals are exciting!”
If the enthusiasm and forced charm were painful enough to make Lucy’s teeth hurt, the current state of Sol was something of an antidote.
“Some say elementals are indistinguishable from spirits, but this isn’t correct. Elementals and elemental practices are the work the spiritual does, channeled through strict physical laws, making contact, sometimes violent contact with our world. Spirits govern, but elementals are the doers. It is an excorporate school of practice. What does that mean, Solisse?”
“Makes stuff,” Sol answered.
“Don’t be sullen. Come on, up on stage. Come on, don’t make everyone wait. Up, up. You couldn’t have combed your hair?”
“I’ve missed you, honey,” she told him, reaching up to sort out the gelled locks of hair at the front of his hairline. Sol gave the room of students sitting in benches a sidelong look. “Excorporate? Full sentence, please.”
“The schools that can take power and make stuff.”
“There are a lot of schools that can take power and make stuff. How is it different from enchanting objects, or creating a ward?”
“Yes. Out of thin air. Or, more technically, from us, our bodies, our power. Excorporate forces include elemental, echoes, and celestial bodies. They’re easiest to bind, banish, and create, when we have a mind to. But with elemental practice, while it’s very easy to use… it hits much harder than the echo you’d get with the same power expenditure. If you have a source of elemental energy, or an elemental Other that you have bound and available to tap, then it’s easy to draw on for raw power. It’s excellent for offense and defense in a pinch, it’s versatile, and at its best, it can be awe-inspiring in strength. Which raises the question. Why isn’t anyone using it?”
A few seconds of silence passed. Then, as students realized it wasn’t a rhetorical question, they glanced around. Nobody seemed to want to volunteer an answer.
“Are you all going to abandon your family schools of practice and come apprentice under me?” Mrs. Ferguson asked. “Come on, you’re big boys and girls with a well-rounded experience.”
Lucy had no idea what the answer was, but she saw Verona squirm and start to raise her hand, and took hold of Verona’s wrist, putting the hand back down.
If this woman wanted to put poor Sol on the spotlight, she could squirm a bit.
It took a little bit, but on the far end of the room, America put her hand up.
“Is it because Elementals are lame and don’t last very long?”
Mrs. Ferguson made a face, then replied, “Not lame, but you’re on the right track. Elementals are fleeting, they exist to change our world and they tend to do it in rushed, dramatic ways, and then they disappear. Look at this Other I summoned earlier. Light and heat energy, and it’s already faltering.”
The Other did look dimmer than before, and it crouched a bit.
“Effective elementalist practice requires that we, sometimes literally, must catch lightning in a bottle. To be in the right place at the right time, to have the right things on hand, and to act fast when that Other or general elemental manifestation is actively tearing up your surroundings, setting them on fire, or flooding the ground you’d want to draw a diagram on. The goal is then to find a home for the elemental, a hallow or a positive environment that keeps them in one position, and this isn’t as simple as you might imagine.”
She walked over to the side of the stage, got a case, and lifted it to a lectern. She popped open the case, grabbed some papers, and handed them to Sol, who looked a bit shell-shocked in the moment.
“Our summoned friend at the side of the stage. Would you invigorate it?”
Sol looked over at the dimming spirit and then down at the paper.
“No pressure, really,” she told him, putting hands on his shoulders from behind him, while the eyes of every student present pressured him. “But don’t let it go out while you’re reading.”
Sol frowned, looking up, then back down. “What am I-?”
“Sol has a list of entities I’ve collected and bound, all of which are in the case. These are other excorporate Others, vestiges, echoes, spirits, and even a cracked cherubim. Creating a bright light or lighting up the area isn’t quite enough to invigorate the elemental Other. Elementals come through environment, strike, and leave through environment, and the wrong trigger would cause it to burn its power and then break into constituent elements, going back to the spirit and physical spaces from whence it came. We need a container.”
“I don’t know,” Sol told her. “Is it this one?”
She looked over his shoulder, frowned, then said, “Don’t ask me. Have you been keeping up with the reading over your school break here?”
“Then if you don’t know, it’s your own fault. Figure it out, now. It’s dying, by the way.”
Sol’s posture was rigid as he read through the page, turned it over, and read the list on the back.
He put the paper down, went to the case, and stood on his toes to peer over the lip, before reaching in.
He lifted out an ID card on a cord then held it at arm’s length. He looked to his mom, who gave no indication of whether the choice was right. The ID card twitched and pulled like something was hauling on it, or it was in a violent wind that nobody else experienced.
“Ahem,” he cleared his throat. “Willie Koehn. Night guard. He snapped, caught some teenagers sneaking into the property to use it as a skate park. It was a pair from a larger group that had mocked him and always got away when he tried to confront them. He ambushed them, and tortured them. Bludgeoned them, breaking their legs, beat them around the heads until they were insensate, then hurt them more. Dumped them into a dumpster. Pretty angry echo.”
Sol’s mother folded her arms. “An echo this angry is better termed a wraith. Nasty influences are mixed into it. You’ll need to summon it.”
“I know. I’m naming it as a prelude to summoning it.”
“Safeguards? What are they teaching you at this school? Sorry, Marie, I know you try, but you’re only one person.”
Durocher didn’t say anything in response, watching.
His mother shrugged, arms still folded.
“Willie Koehn, I call you out. I hold your I.D. card, and I release you. Go into this light,” Sol said.
The card twitched more violently, then it began to shed shadow.
An echo appeared, but it was a dense one. The edges were inconsistent, like it had caught outlines of other ways the head had turned or the arms had moved, and the midsection had gaps like it was missing organs or something had melted through it. The man was big, overweight, and looked about five times as mean as any human should. His face was shiny, his hair and beard wet and sticking to his head like he was in heavy rain.
Lights throughout the room flickered, some going out. Most of the light that filtered in was through blue tinted windows, but the man didn’t take on any of that hue.
“I’m pretty disappointed Sol,” Mrs. Ferguson said.
“Carry on, Sol,” Durocher spoke up.
Sol turned. He held up his hands, keeping them a few inches apart. “The light, Willie. Now.”
The figure twisted, turned, and set its sights on the dimming elemental of heat and light.
It marched forward, pulling out a flashlight that was about a foot long and all metal, thwacking it against palm audibly. Lights flickered more violently as the man closed the distance, reaching out with one fist to grab the elemental by the neck.
It glowed, flashed, and then flowed up the wraith’s arm. The flashlight the wraith held turned on, then turned bright, and the wraith’s eyes lit up.
It grew, visibly, by about half a foot, and that twisted, gap-filled mess in its midsection started to have a light that emanated at the edges.
The wraith turned, looking at the assembled students, and its eyes were like searchlights, casting out light into the gloom. Faint light shone within its mouth.
“That was not the choice I wanted you to make, Sol baby.”
“It wasn’t the right answer,” Mrs. Durocher said, reclining on the stairs that led up to the left side of the stage. “But it’s a right answer.”
“I hear you, Marie, and I disagree. If you have a multiple choice question, you’ll only get the point if you pick the most correct answer. There was another choice that was far more elegant, efficient, and economical, than using a hard-to-acquire wraith.”
“What was your thought process, Sol?” Mrs. Durocher asked.
“That a security guard working an evening shift would have ways to see at night. Like a flashlight or headlamp.”
“You were right. Good job. Now please don’t let it kill my students.”
The wraith set its sights on a corner of the seated class.
The lights flickered, and when they came back on, the wraith was right next to some students sitting on a bench.
“Back!” Sol shouted, his voice high as he held up the I.D. card. “Here!”
The lights flickered, and the wraith appeared behind Sol. He turned around as it lifted up the flashlight to use as a bludgeon, and then pressed the sides of his hand together, completing the diagram there. A rolling explosion blasted the wraith’s head and shoulder off. The flashlight hit the ground without bouncing, a leaden weight that produced an echoing boom on striking floorboards.
Sol thrust the I.D. card into the remains of the wraith. The darkness with glimmers of flickering light threaded through it leeched into the I.D. card.
Mrs. Durocher stood, walked up the stairs, and went to the shelving units at the back.
The I.D. card wasn’t taking in all of the darkness. It began to creep along Sol’s arm.
“Honey, no,” Mrs. Ferguson said, sounding exasperated. “I guess you’re only twelve, after all.”
Sol looked more annoyed at her than the wraith that was slipping its binding.
Mrs. Durocher walked over to Sol, carrying a flashlight that resembled what the Other had held, metal and long. Sol took it, and, hesitating for a second, wrapped the lanyard and laminated I.D. card around it. The card struggled every step of the way, moving of its own volition.
“Authority, Sol,” Durocher’s voice was quiet, but Lucy could hear with the earring. Then again, it was Durocher speaking, so maybe everyone heard.
“Exercise your Self.”
“In!” Sol raised his voice. “I don’t want you, get in!”
“Willie doesn’t like youths,” Mrs. Ferguson told Durocher.
“Too bad for Willie,” Durocher said.
The wraith didn’t look like it was going to listen, but gradually, it gave way.
Lucy wasn’t sure, but Durocher standing as close as she was might have been a factor.
The flashlight flickered, casting a red-tinted light, then went dark. The lanyard and card stopped whipping around.
“A little scary, baby?” Mrs. Ferguson asked. “I’m sorry, I asked too much of you. If Mrs. Durocher hadn’t been here, what would you have done?”
“While it’s crawling all over you?”
“The lesson,” Mrs. Durocher said, putting a hand briefly on Sol’s shoulder before returning to her seat on the stairs.
Mrs. Ferguson beamed. “Yes. We were talking about hallows and homes for elementals. Others can be that point of residence. A vestige can be the broken jar that hold most of it. Even a hazy echo can be the structure an elemental maps to if it has the right anchoring points. The elemental becomes the beating heart of the Other. Electric, hot, storming, boiling, or turbulent, among other possibilities.”
She put papers and things back in the case, retrieved something, and then lowered it to the base of the podium, before dusting off her hands. She held up objects.
“Objects may become inadvertent homes, if they meet the right requirements. Whatever force created or currently holds the Other might have less grip on the Other than the new object. Here is where we war with the environment, and where they protect themselves. I have here a taser, rusty and ulcerating from a leaking battery. It holds a strong Other, and a lot of power. To capture that elemental, I had to deal with downed power lines, wiring tearing itself from walls, and arcs of electricity dancing through hallways. Electricity that did not always follow normal rules. Every bit of chaos it could create was something that kept it present, while also giving it an escape route. This device was used to murder three individuals. Ostensibly nonlethal, not very impressive, it had weight. That weight mattered more than the state of the building and the electrical storms, and the elemental found its home.”
She held up a blasted chunk of what might have been a radiator. “This gained its meaning and momentum through violence. An explosion punched it through the head of the hallow a steam elemental. Destructive force can be its own force, but it only worked because this chunk of metal had affinity for the steam.”
She walked back to the podium, setting the things down. The taser sparked.
“Third, if we’re talking about the background parts of an elemental, we need to talk about realms. The realms we assign to elementals are known as capital-S Storms. Mrs. Durocher, did Raymond set it up?”
“There’s a remote on the shelf inside the stand.”
Mrs. Ferguson bent down, checked the stand that was set up at the front of the stage, for notes, luggage cases, and display, and pulled out a remote. She clicked.
The lights went out again, and the room took on a red haze, with no particular light source. Dark clouds floated where the ceiling should be. Smoke rolled, and lines of white light buzzed, crackled, and arced as they held the shape of electrical towers and power lines, standing out visibly against that backdrop of choking red and black. There was an audible electrical hum.
“Like elementals, the Storms are fleeting, intense, exceedingly valuable and powerful, and very hard to deal with.”
Lightning struck, making nearly everyone jump out of their seats. A second later, more lightning hit, and this bolt not only rocked the room, floor, and the people sitting, but it traveled, digging a trench along ground that left ruined dirt in its wake, that dirt arcing and crackling with its own residual energy. The ground looked like it was melting, like there was nothing that solid about it.
An ozone, burning smell filled the air, prompting some students to cough.
“It takes preparation to survive even a few minutes in a real, un-simulated Storm. They tend to emphasize one element, they arise when a great many elementals gather and die at once, or when a powerful elemental comes into being. Then they pass. You could draw comparisons to a hurricane. When they last for any meaningful length of time, they often, like elementals, have something they root themselves to. One tree that’s been struck by lightning enough times, one building, one object. In an ideal case, an elementalist will want to get to the Storm itself, well prepared, and harvest it for power. If achieved, this can elevate a family dramatically. Most often, we harvest the power after. Tapping a storm, a few good harvests, or one strong elemental caught like lightning in a bottle are things great elementalist families and circles have managed.”
The storm grew more intense as she talked. Figures as tall as the skeletal structures holding up the power lines remained like electrical giants in the wake of some of the blasts, darting around. She had to shout as the sound got especially loud.
The ghostly-white image of the power lines, the red sky, and the black clouds faded, even though the ozone smell lingered.
The walls melted like wax, fire licking them, and smoke rolled up. At times, the wax melted into smoke and rose up. Other times, the smoke seemed to get heavy with chemicals or heavier materials in the smoke and rolled down the walls. Colors ranged from pink to green to yellow, but the tones of fire were dominant.
A single metal chair glowed white-hot at the side of the stage.
Echoes entered the area and ignited, taking on power like the night security guard had. Growing in size, ferocity, with energy burning within.
Random objects ignited and became intense blazes. The only thing missing was the actual heat.
Lucy reached out for a blob of melting wall and her hand passed through it.
“Another Storm. This is terrific, Marie. Raymond’s work? Did he model them off a real storm?”
“I don’t know. He is good, isn’t he?” Durocher asked.
“Storms will keep going because they turn inward. Winds will loop inward instead of venting out, fires will focus toward the interior of a structure instead of spreading. They can cover wide areas, enough to occlude a small settlement, but they can be as small as a single building. It often requires something catastrophic. This is, at the most extreme end, the uppermost tier of elemental power. The things that live and are comfortable in storms are akin to deities, but as fleeting as their storm. We don’t know how many live for a few hours or a day, and how many recede into other territories or realms, waiting for another storm to wake them, before they emerge there. Now, is there a student named Raquel present? Raquel Musser?”
Heads of students around the room turned. Even if nobody actually pointed, the sheer number of eyes that fixed on Raquel made it pretty darn clear that there was.
“Would you come up on stage, dear?” Mrs. Ferguson asked.
Raquel rose to her feet, and because she was closest to Mrs. Durocher, had to slip past the woman who sat on the stairs to get to the stage.
“I’d like to get to know my son’s schoolmates and friends. I’ve heard your name, I’d like your help for the demonstration, if you please.”
“We’ve never really talked, but I’ll help out,” Raquel said, wincing a bit at the fake image of the ‘Storm’ that decorated the classroom.
Lucy felt that Sol was doing a commendable job of holding a poker face and simultaneously looking like he wanted to hurl himself face-first off the stage. Subtle body language, and a frozen expression.
“At the very opposite end to the storm, we have another vessel for elements. And it’s one that is critical to master if we’re to direct the elements, make good use of celestial and crude elemental diagrams, or even host the elementals in our own bodies for brief periods of time, to channel power or withstand a storm such as the one depicted now. The human body. You are a very pretty young lady, Raquel. You seem to be in good health, fit. Sol?”
Sol looked at his mother with that frozen poker face and those dead eyes.
“All of us, in ways both subtle and obvious, have slight affinities for certain elements. Sometimes we even give it away.”
“I like to think I give very little away, Mrs. Ferguson,” Raquel told her.
“If you’d face my son? Sol, stand here?”
Sol moved as ordered, facing Raquel on the stage. The ‘Storm’ continued to ravage the walls and turn the background into a flaming, psychedelic hellscape.
Raquel stood with her hands clasped behind her back, ramrod straight, feet shoulder width apart, her chin raised, staring Sol down. She wore a pleated skirt, black, and a tennis top with no sleeves and a polo collar. She flinched a few times as the fake Storm erupted near her, but she didn’t take her eyes off him.
Sol visibly withered, standing there, his mother behind him with densely tattooed hands on his shoulders.
“Describe her,” his mother said. “As detailed as possible, now. Every little thing can be a sign of the elements and elementals she has affinity for. Do you know, by the way, Raquel? Have you worked it out for yourself?”
“Good, then that makes checking Sol’s answers easier.”
“Hurry up. If you take too long, we won’t have time for everyone here to do practical exercises in the blasting field behind the school.”
“Yeah,” Raquel told Sol. “Please hurry. This is awkward.”
The back door of the classroom opened, and Lucy nearly sagged with relief for Sol, at this interruption. The poor damn kid. The figure was hidden by the holographic ‘Storm’, up until Durocher motioned and Mrs. Ferguson clicked the remote and dismissed everything.
Lucy blinked a few times as her eyes adjusted to the change in scene.
“What’s this interruption?” Mrs. Ferguson asked, arch.
Lucy’s relief was short lived. Verona’s hand gripped her arm.
“Mrs. Durocher?” Wye asked. He didn’t walk to her, but to the western hallway.
Lucy had to lean back, almost falling over the bench, to see into that hallway and see Chase and Tanner. Nicolette was a ways behind, with Ray.
She sat back down, more normally, and tucked hair behind her ear, her fingers finding spots to rest on her earring, as she closed her eyes.
Wye: No. It bothers me I can’t. I started to look for other things. Financial connections, colleagues, people who I know he knows who might have hidden him. I talked to the three skeptics at Sargent Hall, thinking he might be in their company.
Chase: That wouldn’t explain the lack of a trail between here and there. Seems he did a good job of cleaning up the trail behind him.
Wye: He didn’t. Hi, Mrs. Durocher.
Durocher: What did you find?
Wye: I didn’t. I went looking for his car, today.
Raymond: You asked for help on that. I found footage on traffic cameras.
“Can you hear?” Verona whispered
Lucy nodded and held up a finger.
At the front of the room, Sol stammered through the task his mother had given him.
Wye: …was the starting point. Thank you, Ray. The end point was… I talked to authorities, because practice wasn’t getting us anywhere. I steered them in the right directions, paid a couple guys who weren’t on duty to help me find my way around. The car was driven into a river.
Tanner: He knows how to cover his tracks.
Wye: No. This wasn’t him. The car interior was torched, I found his wallet and phone in the muck. His wand, too.
Raymond: You think he’s dead?
Wye: Have you tried to enter his demesne?
Nicolette: Sealed how? There are a lot of interpretations of that.
Raymond: I haven’t tried, frankly. I’ve had enough to do, and his security is good.
Students through the room were chattering. Mrs. Ferguson’s lesson wasn’t getting a lot of traction. The woman raised her voice. “Excuse me!”
“They think Alexander might be dead,” Lucy whispered to Verona, picking her words very carefully.
“Excuse me! Thank you! I’d like to very deliberately ignore the events of this past week and focus on learning, please. Sol is making a commendable effort at describing the beautiful Ms. Musser, noting she’s dressed comfortably for warm weather. That leads us to natural body temperatures-”
“Shut up, nobody really cares about that,” Fernanda declared. “I think they found Alexander, and Wye’s like, the only guy that’s one hundred percent in Alexander’s corner. He didn’t look happy, so something happened.”
Fernada, for that matter, didn’t look especially happy.
Fernanda hadn’t really taken a side in the whole back-and-forth thing, and she’d settled in the middle when they’d made their final play against Bristow.
To go from that, to being this unhappy?
Nicolette: There were some wards and some security that were up there like normal, but the door opened. It’s a mess in there.
Nicolette: Everything he brought in there is jumbled up together, layout’s different, the space is still Important but it’s not…
Raymond: It’s not a demesne anymore?
Durocher: That confirms it. Dead or forsworn.
The chatter was increasing in intensity as students discussed possibilities, and it was a lot of whispers for the Eavesdropper’s earring. Lucy ducked her head down, meeting Verona’s eyes, but neither of them had anything to say. Any words they might have exchanged could be just as easily shared with a glance.
Durocher stepped into the archway, and the volume level dropped.
“Is he dead?” America asked.
“We can’t say anything for certain, but it does appear that way,” Mrs. Durocher said.
“What the frigging fuck!?” America raised her voice.
Everyone had a reaction, and Lucy’s eyes couldn’t move fast enough to grab all of them. Fernanda staggering back to rest her back against a bookshelf, students who had been against Alexander who now looked spooked. Students who’d been for Alexander who looked like they’d had something important ripped from them.
She hadn’t realized how much they cared.
The image of Alexander lying in the mud with his head shattered and leaking sat in her mind’s eye, big enough it choked her throat and made it hard to breathe.
She swallowed hard, and felt Verona’s hand on top of hers.
Others followed behind Durocher, striding into the room. The Belanger circle, or ex-Belanger circle, and Raymond. Nicolette was late, but she was followed by Amine and Ulysse.
“We’ll be calling an end to this class early,” Raymond said. “Please do not get up from your seats.”