The Protection of Ren Crown (33 page)

“The button used between us required skin contact on both sides to conduct the permission and leeching aspects. This one does as well, but in a more, shall we say...
alarming
...way. You preset the permission. An additional device or holding magic is required to”—His fingers made a looping pattern—“keep the permission safe.”

Like
the box, but still not quite enough power or terror. “What about a controller of some kind? Something that allows magic to be leeched over a distance...maybe by pinching space? Tricking the leech into thinking it is skin-to-skin even when there are miles of actual distance between leech and leechee?”

He inclined his head. “That would be possible, especially if you are speaking of a single layer design. Port mages bend space inside a single layer every time they work. Poking a hole between layers is harder, but not impossible. Especially for someone who can wield Origin Magic. Using Origin Magic is like sticking the master key into the unbreakable lock that is the Layer System.” His long fingers mimed breaking a lock in two.

I nodded, pulse picking up as it always did when the subject arose.

“Well, we don't need to try anything between layers yet,” I said. So far, I was reasonably sure that Raphael had always been in the same layer when he had used the box on me. The destruction in Sassraf hadn't been the same. The magic I had felt on Holy Innocents Day in the First Layer had been an echo, not a pull. “If we are going to try pinches, we should bring in Will.”

Constantine wrapped his ribbon around his pointer finger. “I prefer working with you alone.”

“I know. But Will knows travel and transportation magic better than anyone I know. He’s trustworthy, not afraid to get his hands dirty, and has a lot of experience dealing with my messes. Like
serious
experience trapped inside my messes,” I said ruefully.

Something sparked in Constantine's eyes before being banked back to their normal fire. “That's an interesting choice of phrase. Fine. Bring him with you next time, and we shall see.”

“You won't regret it.”

He gave me a long-suffering look, and I flicked a finger at his shoulder, sending out the magical equivalent of a nudge, just as Justice Toad rang to let me know I was now on call and had an active alert. “Service duties. Next two hours. Gotta go.”

“See you in thirty then, Crown. Don't do anything less than I would.”

“Right. No.” Constantine with a service tablet would be the worst idea ever. Hopefully Provost Johnson never got it into his head to give him one. I looked at the call stats. Dorm Five. “Give me at least thirty-five minutes unless you want me to zap you extra hard or ignore the call completely.”

“Depends on how you plan to
zap
me,” he called as I exited.

I rolled my eyes because I could hear his active amusement underlying the false suggestiveness of his words. We both knew I'd respond as soon as he hit the active offense log. Like Delia and Will, Constantine made sure to do any testing that would get him in real trouble while I was on duty.

It was just another way the club of misusing-magic users worked the system. If anyone on the club circuit learned when a two-hour time window commenced for a community service worker, they tested like mad during that period. Since multiple justice mages were on duty at the same time, there were no guarantees that the community service worker would show up at the offender's door, but the increased opportunity that the person
might
respond to a call mitigated some of the risk and opened up an avenue for quality punishments—like cleaning buildings where offenders could simultaneously rifle through cutting-edge research, or patching up magics that forwarded their own aims.

As I walked on top of the Magiaduct from Dorm One to Five, I shook my head and hoped Provost Johnson never figured it out. Professor Wellingham, who was in charge of the Justice Squad, totally knew, but I was pretty sure he had already given up on humanity, in general.

I knocked on the appropriate door in Dorm Five ten minutes after the call registered. My tablet had already fully labeled the villainy—a Level Two “artifact control restriction” registered to an Asafa Frey.

The door was opened promptly by a boy with bright red hair and green eyes. I almost blurted out something about his face missing three horns, but managed to hold my tongue.

“Well, damn,” the boy from the cafeteria said, running a hand through his short hair. “It registered.” He sighed. “Who took the hit, sweet justice lass? Asafa or Patrick?”

“Asafa Frey,” I answered, amused.

He sighed and addressed a pair of dark legs sticking out from under a behemoth of a desk. “Sorry, Saf. Was supposed to be my turn.” He turned back to me. “Could you give us but a moment, dear lady, to finish our testing log?”

He looked resigned, as if he expected me to object. But always interested in the goings-on around the rule-breaking circuit, I nodded. “Sure. Mind if I come in?”

Justice Toad would either heat up if we overextended the appropriate preliminary call time or turn someone into an amphibian. My tablet had a quick draw, but at this point, I was pretty used to catching rogue hoppers and turning them back into people.

Clover-green eyes examined me, then lit up. “The new gal! Lucky day for us, Saf. Come in, my gal. Name's Patrick, or Trick, if you are going to be around a lot. Asafa's over there. We're almost finished.”

It never took long for anyone to identify me as a community service worker. Something about me obviously screamed my illegitimacy as a policewoman.

“Gaming system test run. You don't mind if we finish copying down the notes and schematics on how we put it together, do you?”

I furrowed my brow and looked at Justice Toad. “Gaming systems are legal,” I said, scrolling down the log to find information on the offense.

“Er, yes. But ones that use compulsive magic, not so much.”

“You make people want to continue gaming? Are you finding that people are playing too little?” I asked in astonishment, unable to comprehend such a thing. There were more or less permanent gaming tables set up on the main floor of the library—tables with elaborate holograms and students with magical sensors at their temples and palms playing the games at all hours of the night. I saw them
every
visit I made to the library. And I was in the library a
lot
.

The cafeteria boy with the truly spectacular, height-defying hair emerged from underneath the large desk in the center of the room. “Just testing human limits. All done, Trick, but it's going to take increased power, a better art render, and the implementation of our upgraded controller specs.”

I looked at the game controller in his hand—a thin headband that wrapped horizontally around the user's head—and all sorts of ideas jumped fully formed into my mind. A controller that used compulsion and could work at a distance...

I couldn't stop a smile as I cocked my head to look at the controller from another angle. The club worked insanely well on the barter system. “What kind of art rendering?”

Both boys looked at me, looked down at the doodle-covered notebook peeking out of my bag, then grinned.

Chapter Eighteen: Hidden Sides

I won Mike twenty munits when Will and I jammed in the architecture class feed before midnight. It was mostly syllabus and intro, but exciting nevertheless. Class was going to be fantastic.

Will and I had also gotten in a quick visit to Constantine together, who'd smiled at the hologram of the controller in my palm, then interrogated Will to within an inch of his life. I was just happy Constantine had stopped his questioning before Will admitted who it was who held the other side of the leash we were fighting against. I could see in Constantine's calculating gaze that he knew Will was aware of the leash holder's identity, but, strangely, Constantine never pressed. Then again, it wouldn't shock me if he already knew. Constantine could assemble a thousand piece emotional puzzle from the tiniest social and emotional clues.

With Constantine's consent to include Will in the project, the three of us brainstormed past the edge of sanity. One thing the three of us had in common was an absence of imaginative limitations.

Despite the many shadowy threats surrounding me, and an uncertain clock ticking down to when Raphael could use my magic again, studying at Excelsine was awesome. If there was one thing that I had learned in the last six months, it was that I had to balance uncertainty and fear with other, more positive actions and thoughts in order to maintain a creative peak.

So I let a grin pull to my face whenever I thought about the gaming specs Asafa and Patrick had shown me. Christian would have loved so many things in this world.
I
loved so many things in this world.

Keeping a mental balance was a continuous struggle that I was determined to win. And when I defeated Raphael, I could... I would be able to do
anything.

At four in the morning, I tripped into my room and face-planted on my bed.

~*~

Olivia was gone when I woke to rising sunlight, a slowly lifting mattress, and the heavy, rising beat of the room's alarm clock spell.

I rolled out of bed and hurried to the shower. Warding class with Mbozi was at ten and I didn't want to miss a word.

Two and a half hours later, I was brimming with awesome ideas for shoring up the dream wards even further. Class was going to be great. I had a serious professor crush on Mbozi. A crush that withstood every strange look and resigned sigh he cast my way. Last term I'd helped him rebuild the art vault, art complex, and protection wards I'd destroyed and I had been overjoyed to do the work, pestering him relentlessly with questions.

Normal people probably weren't usually so giddy over speculative engineering, but the work with Mbozi had been key to setting the wards in Okai—the only place other than the vault where I could safely use paint on campus.

I was finally in one of his classes legitimately, and out of an intro class of two hundred, Mbozi had spotted me in the crowd almost immediately.
Awesome!
I pretended the small sigh he had given immediately after recognizing me was because he was just as excited to do some magical science as I was.

I didn't have time to go to the cafeteria, so I grabbed a hot Magi Mart burrito from our food box—which held individual temperature spells for each food item inside—and plugged the small chip I had gotten from Patrick and Asafa into my reader. I scrolled their game specs as I munched my food. Robots and monsters dominated. No problems there. I had been drawing robots and sword and sorcery imagery for Christian since pre-school, and through the years the designs had only gotten more complicated.

Once I got something set in my mind, it would be easy to repeat the work. But doing quality work on new projects took time. Setting to mind was the time consuming part.

My two-hour work session with Stevens started in thirty minutes and I had to meet Dare immediately thereafter, so I quickly ran to the Midlands to sketch out a dragon for Dare and a small Midlands' map projection. I wasn't going to be able to tie a map to him in the same way I had tied one to me—not without touching him with Awakening paint, which was a giant
no
—but I could make something he could use.

Unlike the new designs for Asafa and Patrick, it took me barely any time to sketch a repeat of a previous design. And repeating magic was easy as well. If I had done it once, my memory logged it in a physical way. I activated the dragon with a drop of glorious paint, and fought the ever present urge to use more, more, more.

The dragon curled around my palm. I had told Dare that making them required magical sacrifice. The sacrifice was not the effort or my personal magic; the sacrifice was the drop of paint. The dwindling Awakening paint in my last non-orange tube.

As I entered the all-glass interior of the building that housed the offices and labs for the Material Magics and Sciences professors, a yawn overtook me before I could stifle it. Constantine was working in a lab off to the side and raised a perfect, mocking brow at my drooping eyes and post-lunch-without-enough-sleep stupor.

I gave him a wave and pushed into Stevens' work office. In her kickass magical stilettos and designer skirt, Stevens was moving her hands in the air, as if she was writing equations on the wind, using magic that was invisible to my eyes, even now.

“Pulp pressing,” she said before I'd even stepped fully in the door. “Ten perfect iterations on my desk before the end of the day.”

She didn't take her eyes off the air she was manipulating in front of her.

How do you know Raphael, Professor Stevens?
I wanted to ask, but instead my lips said, “We are making paper?”

“Didn't I just say so?”

Before I could stop the words I blurted out, “I'd like to focus fully on paint-making this term.”

Stevens’ fingers stilled in the air, glued there momentarily. “I don't remember asking for your opinion on what I would teach you when I took you on.”

“You didn't. You also weren't completely upfront as to why you were taking me on.” That last bit was uttered without conscious determination, and I immediately knew it was a mistake.

She turned. Her gaze upon me was cool and impersonal as her hands dropped to her sides. “Are you challenging me?” She was studying me as if examining a bad slide sample.

“I'm challenging our syllabus.”

“Independent study parameters are at the sole discretion of the professor. You are challenging
me
.”

Professor Stevens was a magical and intellectual giant. She was the top of her field, a scientist I highly respected, and a mentor—but I didn't know if I could trust her outside the classroom.

How do you know Raphael Verisetti, professor?

But asking questions aloud about one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world would be stupid.

The question didn't form on my lips, but it hovered in the air between us. It had hovered ever since she had taken a look at the shield set around me—a complete stranger—then initiated a devious introduction between us, trapped me inside of a truth spell, and interrogated me about my loyalties.