The Rise of Ren Crown (52 page)

I fished out a storage paper—one of my best ones. “What do you say to traveling in style?”

The vine cocked its head, then dove neatly into the paper. “Huh,” I said picking it up and seeing it curled up inside. “It did it on its own.”

Usually I had to use my own magic to sink things inside.

“Don't trust it,” Constantine said darkly. “Get rid of it as quickly as you can once we find a spot.”

That seemed...unkind. “I'll find you somewhere nice,” I whispered to it, and folded the sheet, sticking it in a secured pocket along with the cloaks, the containers, and everything else I was carrying like a mad art mercenary.

“So, how...?” My question faltered as I rounded the main worktable in the center of the room.

Constantine hadn't said exactly how we were getting off campus, but now...now I knew.

A vortex projected upward from a single dot on the floor, swirling in controlled rotations.

He'd been making vortexes in his room—in an
ottoman
—over two terms, maybe more. He'd let me observe some of his progress after we'd become daily business acquaintances. I'd
helped
him hide some of the Justice Magic infractions. I hadn't known what the vortexes had been for.

Until Tuesday.

It was simple really, as Constantine had said it would be, to get off campus and into the Third Layer. Constantine had held the solution in his room the whole time.

I crossed my arms. “This is one of the vortexes you built for Godfrey.”

“Never. I had to make this one again from scratch,” he said idly.

“Constantine.”

“All of the others started in the Third Layer and ended at Excelsine. This one goes in quite the opposite direction.”

“Will it take us to the spot where the others originated?”

Constantine smiled, but it was without humor. “The origination points were designed to be used at the moment of activation. They never did get a chance to use the vortexes for human transport, though. They tested them only, sending small things through to my room.
Emrys
was the one who opened the school's wards from the inside—using Telgent and pawns in the Administration.”

And Constantine. Raphael had used Constantine to dissolve the wards. Constantine had left the mixture in a designated spot on the mountain. Axer was right—oh, how that must have
stung
when Constantine realized who he had been talking to that whole time. Even if Raphael had been in golem form, he had been
right there
.

“Verisetti set it all up, every last piece of Tuesday, except for you.”

“Oh, he planned for me too. But I don't think he minded how everything shook out. He was playing multiple games, trying to get me discovered, trying to hide me. He had plenty of plans for if I was taken by the Department.”

Could still have those plans. It was obvious to everyone, even me, that this was some sort of a trap. It was just a trap the mouse was hoping to conquer.

I looked at the vortex. Time was ticking. “You programmed in a destination?”

“Yes, the same one given to us by Peoples.”

I nodded. Delia had been working her contacts.

“So, how do we do this?”

I didn't know enough about vortexes to even chance a guess. And it looked uncomfortably like the one that had almost eaten me in the Library of Alexandria.

This was Will's field, not mine. Will was going to be
crushed
he missed this.

“You jump in,” Constantine said as if I was being dense.

“You are crushing Will's heart right now by not having him help.”

“Tasky is addicted to portal pads,” Constantine said dismissively.

It was a little true—Will and I had met because Raphael and I had created a portal pad that worked in all layers during my Awakening. Will and I had tried to dredge up the memory of that process
several
times with no success.

“Will loves everything interesting. Especially when it has to do with travel.”

“You are stalling, Ren.” Constantine hummed.

I looked at the vortex. It was a one-way trip down that supernatural whirlpool. And I was going, but Constantine... “Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked him.

“Don't be silly, darling.” His voice was light, but the undertone was not.

“We are likely to get expelled or jailed, even if Patrick says you have a 'Get Out of Jail Free Card.'”

“Those are but trifling concerns.”

Trifling concerns, in contrast to the revenge that he had been seeking for years. It was glittering in his eyes. Truth.

Looking at him in this moment, even with his promise and my belief in him, I wasn't so certain that his revenge
would
come second.

He abruptly stepped toward me, gaze entirely focused, and his fingers wrapped around my elbow—the one that held so many of the threads connecting us. “I swear that I will rescue your roommate first and foremost after making sure that you survive.”

My breath hitched as the magic wrapped around us, securing the vow. Everything in me relaxed.

“You didn't have to—”

“You are at ease now,” he said, as if unaffected by the magic I could still see rippling over his fingers. He slowly released my elbow. “And your trust is critical.”

I frowned. “Critical to what?”

“To me, of course,” he said lightly.

I sighed. “Right. Why do you make everything sound so shady? We could have had a nice moment there, you know.”

He smiled, though he tried to hide it. “It's one of my many skills. We can still have a nice moment. Come here.”

I held up a hand, palm out toward his descending face. “Not a chance.”

He laughed and walked closer to the vortex. “Come, darling. Destiny awaits. And your troublemakers have just set off diversion number three. There will be no more to be had.”

The vortex swirled in a mesmerizing mass of white and purple.

He flashed a hand toward it. “Beauty before gorgeousness.”

I sighed again. “Stupidity before supervillainery?”

“Yes. Also, because I need to close the vortex behind us, unless you want Praetorian Tarei diving in when they come to search the room in—” He tapped his arm. “—three point five minutes.”

I stared at him, anxiety rising again. “Constantine, what—”

“Jump in.”

I carefully examined his resolute expression, then nodded. Above everyone, Constantine knew what he was getting into.

“So, I just...” I looked at the small white and purple tornado. “Jump in?”

“Enter the vortex,” he said, voice low, while unnecessary smoke rose around him in a parody of some hoary, mystical moment.

“Very funny. Glad to see your humor is still intact.” I examined the swirls of the vortex. I was again reminded of the Library of Alexandria. “If my leg goes in, but the rest of me is still out here for too long, will it swallow my leg somewhere?”

“I can drop you in.” That wasn't an answer, and he seemed amused. Which
likely
meant that I was going to be fine. Constantine's amusements were sometimes quite dark and vicious, but I hadn't yet been the victim of anything cruel. And on a mission of such importance to him, he'd have told me up front if there was something to fear here.

I pulled over a chair and stood on top, staring down. Olivia was on the other side. And, in the end, that was what made the choice easy.

I jumped and the room disappeared as I was sucked into a space too small.

Swirls of white and purple pulsed over and around me as if I was being forced down a tube at great speed. I could feel added magic—Constantine—as he jumped in after me.

We disappeared from campus, from the Second Layer, and into the Third.

Chapter Forty-three: The Third Layer

All the practice in the world wouldn't have prepared me for the
feeling
of it. We landed on an endless expanse of amber colored dirt.

My first impression of the Third Layer was so disjointed from reality that I couldn't process it mentally for a moment.

A slim, audible stutter of air escaped my throat.

Constantine kicked a small rock with his foot and it propelled itself with too great a force into the
finite
sky, then just as suddenly altered its course and slammed back to the ground, creating a five-foot crater that rocked the ground beneath us

“Welcome to the Third Layer, darling.”

A dusty, wasteland of magic swirled uncontrollably around us. The atmosphere was
pinched
in places, the sky meeting the ground in a foreign, Daliesque way—as if magic couldn't sustain the pillars of the world, and had melted plastic pieces of sky and earth together in the collapse.

I had seen pictures. Eight weeks of Layer Politics classes three times a week plus homework hadn't kept me ignorant of what had happened to the Third Layer. But most of our classes had to do with the politics between the layers and the political efforts made between. And we'd been saving the “ways to go forward using everything we've learned” discussions for the last few weeks of term, which we hadn't yet fulfilled.

Seeing the devastation firsthand—
feeling
it—was a lot different than reading about it and abstractedly observing pictures.

“It—” I reached out a hand as if I could unhook the sky from the ground where it was pinched, then curled my fingers back in. My breath stuttered and my magic tried to reach forward. To connect to all the broken paths.

It would be visually fascinating if it didn't feel so
wrong.

“Darling?”

“It's horrible,” I breathed.

“It's the Third Layer.” His lips curled distastefully. “It's akin to hell. Or a vacation in Tus Onus,” he said pensively. “Horrible place. All tourists and pr—”

“The magic here. It's broken.”

He looked around, cocking his head as if to try and see it from a new view. He held out his hand to me without looking back, and I put mine within his grip. I sent the vision of it—the grid of broken connections and strings with torn ends.

“Ah. I could swim in your brain, darling.”

“Yeah, I've heard that before.” I sighed and dropped his hand, concentrating on what I
could
do.

“You can't fix it,” he said sharply. “And you
can't
do magic out here without drawing on a container hooked to your recycler. We went over what happens if you use magic here outside of a safe zone, Ren.”

It was always serious when he was addressing me by name.

“Yes, I know, layer shift, blah, blah. What if we just
fixed
the layer shifts?”

“And world hunger. Peace. We could go for a trifecta.”

“You heard Stevens,” I said softly. I had shared the memory of what had happened after he left.

“Yes. And I'm quite
put out
that she pinned you with any such feeling of
duty
like that,” he bit out.

“I could do it. She's right. Technically right.” I swallowed the dry—no,
sterile
—air and looked carefully around. “It's not like I'm going to say abracadabra and fix anything. But I have the correct...skill set, or whatever. I could fix it. And because I
can
, I do have an inherent responsibility.”

“Or you could let them all
burn
. It's what they will do to you.”

I crossed my arms, tucking my hands beneath my armpits. “Let's just find Olivia.”

“Yes, let's find your wayward roommate,” he said. “Who will tell you what such ridiculous notions these are.”

He wasn't wrong about that.

A strange animal, half-cat, half-lizard screeched as it appeared around a pinch in the world—jumping from around its bend and taking us completely by surprise.

Enough of a surprise that I formed my mental pyramid and blasted magic to encase it—magic that I pulled from the air. The magic rippled out, then up, then out again—the layer shifting almost audibly around us. Wow, well
named.

Next to me, Constantine closed his eyes.

“Sorry,” I said, cringing. And here I'd thought I'd be all “First Layer cool” and not even think to use magic—but no, when magic attacked, my first response was to respond with magic, apparently. I blamed Alexander Dare for this.

The gathering mushroom cloud of magic spread over us. The earth rumbled beneath our feet and a hundred bolts of green lightning fragmented the sky.

In the Second Layer, the backlash from every magic use was contained and distributed, safely dealt with over an intricate system of ever-expanding technology and research.

In the Third Layer, this system was...not present.

“Run, Crown.”

To where? I wanted to say. But instead I grabbed his arm. “We aren't going to make it.”

“One of us will.” He sounded resigned, even though he nearly had to shout over the howling winds. He pushed me. “Go.”

His fingers were already glowing, drawing magic, and he was staring upward, preparing. The magic cloud had finished gathering, and it shot down toward the one who was drawing more magic, completely uninterested in me.

I launched myself at Constantine, shoved him to the ground, and arced the containment field I had strapped to my shoe over the top of us just as the blast hit.

Pain. Darkness. Blinding light. The backlash swept over the field and upward in a long arc, then made a rapid swirl and hammered down.

Lightning—completely unnatural lightning—howling winds, and grinding cracks struck and shifted and
broke
upon us.

Over and over. Until finally, the hammering grew less and less, and the tendrils dissipated outward in almost caressing wisps.

The black spots slowly, painfully cleared from my vision. Tinnitus still rang my ears. Mineral dust clogged my nose. And my body...

“Ow,” I said into the unyielding rock my shoulder was pressed against. My shoulder ached, I had a fractured rib, and something was bruised in my midsection. No stranger to pain, the sensations running through my body were still extremely unpleasant.

I turned my head to see Constantine staring at me blankly, as if a soul-sucking wind had swept through him and left nothing behind. But a quick—passive magic!—check through our connection indicated he was physically fine. I had taken the brunt of it all as the person connecting with the field.