196

    ******

    Ignacio had left him with a knife. S?ren wasn’t sure if it was to protect him or to keep him company while he waited here, flat on the floor, snugged between his tube-shaped sandbag and the barrier. Maybe when a person had several dozen knives on them they started to feel more like stickers or pieces of chewing gum than weapons. A friend is sad? Bored? Offer them one of your sharp things to brighten their day!

    It was one of his nicer knives, too. Or one of his nicer-looking ones anyway. Ignacio’s gym supply was mostly made up of knives he didn’t mind ruining, so they tended to be battered. This one had a long double-edged blade polished to a mirror finish. S?ren tilted it and noticed the way the light bounced off to shine on the rough fabric of the sandbag. A piece of shiny metal is a better Shaper than I am.

    That was an exaggeration and a pointless thought. More important things were happening. S?ren angled the blade so that he could see some of the fighters reflected in it as they closed in on Instructor Klein.

    Amazing. They look amazing.

    And it would have been completely unmanageable to be there in the middle of them. Figuring out where Finlay and Febri were moving would be impossible, and that was only two of the people involved.

    What if they do it? What if we actually make it to the end today? I could get some help from—

    The feeling of his sandbag being dragged away from him startled him so much that he gasped and sprang into a crouch, knife held up to defend himself.

    “You can come with me now,” Winston Heelfeather said, looking down on him through mirrored lenses. “I’ll take you across with my team.”

    He was hefting S?ren’s sandbag onto his own shoulders.

    “What?” S?ren lowered the knife because Winston was talking like he was completely confident he had S?ren’s cooperation for some obvious plan. S?ren wondered if he’d missed a sudden problem that made a team switch-up necessary or if a message had come that he hadn’t noticed.

    And then Winston said, “I’ll be taking this in any case, to protect my team. Come with us if you want. It’s better for you than waiting around and better for the S’s if they don’t have to take care of you. Don’t say I didn’t give you a fair chance.”

    S?ren’s mouth fell open. He started to realize what was going on even though he didn’t understand why it was going on. But before he could form an argument or lunge forward, the speedster was spinning and taking off.

    As S?ren accepted the reality of his situation in the next blink, his thoughts went from tumbling confusion to rising fear and fury.

    My sandbag! Why?! His team’s running ahead? He was supposed to be helping! The plan! My teammates! What happens when the wind starts? I have a knife!

    He was running after Winston Heelfeather. He was throwing the knife like it was a ball because he had no idea how to throw a knife. It sailed past Winston’s left ear. S?ren was losing ground.

    That tended to happen when you chased after Speed Brutes, but...

    I can’t. I can’t let them all down and ruin this last run because I couldn’t even protect a bag of sand.

    He tried to run faster, and couldn’t. He looked around for something else to throw, and there was nothing.

    The knife was shining on the floor, too far away for S?ren to pick it up, but so bright that it looked like he ought to be able to in another way. Fine, he thought, pointing at it. Fine. r??

    He jabbed his other index finger at a glinting piece of debris in a distant pile. He started to glow.

    I don’t care how useless it is or how stupid I look doing it. I don’t care if all I manage is making him sparkle. By the time the wind hits, I’m going to use every last bit of magic the System gave me.

    If he sparkles bright enough, maybe it’ll distract him so I can kick him in his stupid face.

    ******

    ******

    “If you happen to see S?ren trying to shape, give him a little time to finish the job,” Torsten advised the volunteers in the classroom. “He’s having difficulty grasping his powers, and since his results have been so lackluster, he rarely musters the confidence to use anything but his fists in actual combat. I’ve spoken with him about it. I told him that even if he only warms up the enemy’s feet, he still ought to try to get them warmer than he did the last time. I hope that was the right thing.

    “He’s agreed to work on it, but I expect him to be especially reluctant today because of the team component. The pressure of our last team challenge was a little too much for him, and he worries about bothering the other students.”

    He looked like he wanted to say more, but he only glanced once again at S?ren’s wanted poster, sighed, and moved to the last one on the list.

    “And finally, this is our first Rabbit student in the Talent Development Program. Alden Thorn.”

    ******

    ******

    All class, Instructor Waker had been practicing his pitching from a fixed position at the far end of the gym, by the finish line. He’d only dashed around or jumped up into the air a few times to change the angle of his throws. Alden had been more focused on when the strikes would be coming than where exactly they’d come from, but he thought Big Snake usually changed up his style when the people he wanted to hit were glued to another team. One strategy for dealing with the shock traps was to follow in the footsteps of others and hope they ran into them all for you, and Big Snake obviously didn’t consider it fair sportsmanship to hit his targets by sending one of his projectiles through a team enjoying a reprieve from his attacks. So he moved when he needed to.

    He was moving now, preparing to bounce into the air on legs that could kick down trees when the man was in the mood for some casual woodcarving.

    Why isn’t he classified as a hyperbole already?

    The question flashed through Alden’s mind as one of his feet hit his own personal ground patch and launched him forward and upward. Before he could think through whether he should protect the teammate he guessed the giant dog crate might be aimed at, his body had already committed him to trying it.

    Haoyu, Lexi, and Kon were all possibilities since they were either moving forward or attacking. Kon was the most vulnerable one, so Alden was headed toward him.

    And toward the battle.

    His stomach clenched as something that was probably one of Tuyet’s darts whizzed past his neck. Marsha was swinging. Astrid was stiff as a board on the floor. Torsten Klein seemed to be everywhere.

    Alden landed hard. He didn’t hurt himself, and his balance was good. But he didn’t have time to be pleased that his practices with Bobby and his wordchain were paying off. He really wasn’t that far from where he’d just been crouching with Everly, but he’d jumped into a riot of flying bodies, spells, and weapons that was worse than he’d expected. The plan for corpse duty had been to run in and rescue the first person to fall near the perimeter of the fight, but now that he was here, he realized there was no perimeter to speak of.

    Kon, moving to get beside Lexi, had looked as though he was near the edge of it. At the moment, though, Alden was just a step or two away from him, and there wasn’t anything like an edge here. Either the battlefield had expanded in the time it took him to jump to this spot, or it was a different, even less comprehensible place once you were inside it. Yelling in a couple of languages, popping sounds, a brief whoosh of wind so hard he staggered, knives over his head. And the Agility Brutes were the worst as far as visual confusion went. Finlay was fast, but his feet stayed mostly on the floor. Febri and Mehdi were behaving like popcorn kernels, exploding and flying off in random directions in response to the heat of battle.

    This is one hundred percent not where I need to be. This is too central to—

    Dog crate!

    It was coming in hard from above, launched by Big Snake from high up and far away, but still accurate. It was going right toward the brothers, so Alden was already moving again, leaping with his shield up, feeling a swell of energy as he realized he’d gotten the timing right and he was going to intercept the crate perfectly.

    And then Febriwas crashing into the metal cage from the side and wrapping his arms around it. He used Instant Corners to redirect his own body, and the next thing Alden knew, the dog crate he’d come to save Kon from was flying toward Klein. Who was no longer in the way when it arrived, of course.

    It slammed into the floor meters away, and Jeffy fell over it. He wasn’t even supposed to be a part of this fight; he just hadn’t managed to clear out from being on the bait team yet. Or he didn’t want to clear out.

    “Alden, you came to save us!”

    “You’re both supposed to be over there with Everly!”

    “You’re supposed to be whipping Klein, not waving Writher around like a broom handle you don’t know how to use. Hit him. Hit him!”

    “Shut up! That piece of bicycle you threw landed closer to New Zealand than to the enemy. Both of you get lost or get behind me.”

    The Roberts brothers were talking so fast Alden mostly got the impression of Kon being enthusiastic and Lexi being stressed rather than the words.

    “Behind me!” Lexi shouted again.

    There was no real behind him, though. Not if he meant that Alden and Kon should position themselves so that he was closer to the danger than they were. The danger was coming from every direction. Alden would need to spin like a top to keep Instructor Klein in view, and that was assuming he didn’t try to dodge anything else going on out here.

    Grab and go. That’s all I can do. Grab someone and go.

    His eyes skimmed for problems. Heloi?sa was crawling aggressively—too far away. Astrid was just lying there like a statue, clearly stiff-suited. Finlay was shouting and falling as he took one of Marsha’s slashes to the lower body. It was impossible to tell whose fault it was. She might have aimed without considering him, or he might have just zipped right into the path of it.

    The Speed Brute’s body slid and rolled across the floor toward Alden and the brothers like he’d been thrown from a car on the freeway. God, that looks horrible.

    “Kon, we grab Finlay and go!” he said.

    Then he ran for the speedster. He was breathing hard. He didn’t know which way to point his shield. There were actually a lot of factors in getting that right if multiple types of threat were coming his way, and he couldn’t sort it all. The overwhelming pace of the violence was making this different from a typical moment in class. He felt like he needed to zero in on something, and apparently it was going to be the person he’d just seen take a serious injury.

    His thoughts were jumbled, but the jumble was pointing in that direction. Grab Finlay. Maybe hurl him toward the starting line. He might even make it back in time to help once his suit gets res—duck!

    He didn’t even know who he was ducking under. Some airborne figure that would have taken his head off if he hadn’t. Things were impacting his shield. Wind. A bicycle bell. A metal shard.

    That’s fine. Debris is fine. I’m not too tired to protect the shield from that.

    “I’ll carry him!” Kon yelled, lunging ahead of Alden to grab the Scottish boy. “Go for the start!”

    Okay, Kon’s with me. Finlay’s in his arms. Gotta keep Kon from taking a bad hit.

    If Kon got safely away with Finlay, that was two saved. If Kon got away, that was one more teammate outside this mess to make sure they didn’t get completely wiped.

    Where’s the way out?

    Only seconds had passed since he’d landed in the midst of this melee, and even though he couldn’t possibly see what was happening with everyone, he had a sense that something about the fight was going badly for his side of it. It was everything, all together, looking not quite right from moment to moment.

    He spotted a girl with silver hair, closer than he’d expected her to be, turning to run back to Haoyu and the starting line as a fragment of washing machine grazed past her.

    “Go back!” Winston yelled over his shoulder. “You’re way slower than me, and the wind will start soon!”

    S?ren screamed with animalistic fury.

    He’s lost his mind.

    “You’re too weak to be out here on your own! Give up! Give up for your own good!”

    Winston had almost reached his teammates. This was going to work.

    ******

    ******

    “Alden,” Torsten said to the volunteers, who looked just a little more interested than they had a moment ago, “has a noteworthy personal life, as I’m sure you all know.”

    “I can tell overstating isn’t one of your bad habits.” Aparna drummed her fingers on top of her student desk. “We don’t see many teenagers rubbing shoulders with wizards.”

    “No,” Klein agreed.

    “Haoyu loves having him as a roommate,” said Hale.

    “I liked helping with Matadero Thanksgiving,” said Jianwei. “That should become a tradition.”

    “I have no comment on that.” Torsten looked at the wanted poster. The video clip showed Alden Thorn catching tennis balls. “Tempting though it might be to gossip about him—”

    “I am tempted,” Aparna said.

    “Tempting though it might be,” Torsten said firmly, “I’ll keep us on track by talking about Alden’s gym performance and special considerations related to it. He’s on an impressive discovery streak with his powers right now. The timing of it might be due to his personal circumstances, but it’s encouraging to see such swift progress from him anyway. The ability shown on the video here is his main skill, being used in a novel way.

    “He places objects or people in magical stasis. The stasis is absolute while the skill is active. There appears to be no circumstance in which whatever he’s protecting will change from within or take damage from without, unless the skill or the skill user fails. Keep that in mind because you won’t have cues to know when he’s approaching skill fatigue. It’s not like some shielding spells you might have encountered that weaken before they break.

    “We do know that he wears his skill out much faster when he tries to preserve something that extends a significant distance from his body. He’s currently exploring what he can do with rope, so it’s come up. He might be able to shield something on the end of a thread half a gym away, but you’re unlikely to see him do it given the practical limitations and magical cost.

    “Alden has a movement trait that won’t make an appearance unless he finds the proper element to stand on. It provides him with a modest increase in the distance he’s able to cover every time he propels himself off the ground. Not spectacular, but practical.

    “If we’d had this talk a few weeks ago, the only other thing I would have been able to warn you about was his penchant for throwing his own spell ingredients at people as a distraction.”

    “Are they cheap?”

    Torsten glanced at Aparna. “He has temper spheres. They turn invisible if he uses a spell on them, but he tosses them around without bothering to cast that spell more often than not.”

    She laughed. “So not as cheap as they might be!”

    “They break less frequently than I would have expected. Thanks to the discovery streak I mentioned, there’s more to say than there was. Alden is able to lift impressive amounts of weight, as long as he can get the weight secured on top of or within something he’s protecting with his skill. He currently seems to be interested in learning what results he can get by accelerating and launching objects with preserved rope. He’s also able to use his skill on things that are thrown to him, conserving the force of the throw. That’s interesting, but it’s not threatening at this point. He’s limited by his ability to actually detect and catch what’s coming at him.”

    Torsten turned to the video once more. “Alden also seems to be able to sense the location of objects that have been entrusted to him. This particular instance in the footage was his first time doing that, so I’m curious to see the ability develop in the future.

    “His skill has some restrictions that are inconvenient, to say the least. To use the power at all, he has to be given something or told to take it by a targeted individual. He can only target one person at a time. If he drops the object he’s preserving, he can’t reactivate the stasis on it until he gets permission again.”

    Aparna was frowning.

    Melanie had looked up from her notes. “That’s more punishing than inconvenient. I’ve heard of some absurd restrictions on abilities, but that seems like too much considering what the skill is. I assume it must be intended for some esoteric job on the Triplanets?”

    “We can only speculate at this point. Alden manages the skill’s limitations and versatility very well from what I’ve seen. He’s studious, and he seems to be interested in making up for his low foundation points by learning wordchains. He’s already started using one that makes him more surefooted and graceful. That level of dedication is something I can appreciate as his instructor. I hope to see his work rewarded over the coming years.

    “ Given the many unknowns in his case, I have concerns about that, but for now...I look forward to seeing how he handles himself in class.”

    ******

    ******

    To Alden, at that moment, Torsten Klein looked a little like a demon. Here was something bigger than he’d expected, something dangerously altered from what it had been just minutes ago, transformed by the chaos around them. Suddenly, imagination was easier.

    What if it was coming for Kibby?

    The lights in the gym seemed to dim as if to acknowledge the question. He was still aware of where he really was, but the idea of casting aside his shield and accepting injury for the sake of team goals was gone.

    Klein plunged toward them, the cage held in front of him like a strange battering ram.

    My shield’s going to break.

    If the instructor had thrown the cage, then it would be different. Alden could take a really hard hit from a mundane object. But Klein himself bulling through changed the outcome. A dog crate was just a dog crate; Torsten Klein was an Avowed.

    He had the authority to move through this spot faster and harder than a normal man. And Alden had the authority to guard this, his burden—a simple mat of yellow webbing he’d made for his team’s windshield.

    His skill was going to be exhausted in no time, just like it had been when Marsha had hit him with her magical slash in duels.

    What if I was on Thegund? What if I was guarding Kibby?

    The gym seemed to darken even more. It was all happening in a heartbeat.

    Alden wasn’t dropping his shield.

    ******

    ******

    “You’re too weak to be out here on your own! Give up! Give up for your own good!” Winston Heelfeather was shouting. He had S?ren’s sandbag.

    I shape the light toward me, then I shape it away.

    S?ren didn’t know how many times he’d activated his skills. He was getting farther and farther behind this pustule of a human being who was mocking him for being too slow and too weak.

    The gym was gaining shadows. Galecourse had just finished her lap. She was about to ruin everything.

    I shape it toward me.

    Who cared if light made sense? He was its Shaper. It was supposed to be his. He pulled his arms in close to his chest; his hands curled in front of his heart in a gesture that felt natural because the System had given it to him when it affixed him.

    I shape it away.

    “You nasty little fucker!” screamed S?ren. “Are you faster than light?!”

    He thrust his hands out.

    Winston Heelfeather disappeared in a blaze of white.

    ******

    ******

    The cage slammed into the shield. Metal crumpled against magic

    Alden felt the clash of their powers, like he was being swept aside and denied a spot he’d tried to claim.

    But at the same time, there was something real here. He lasted longer than he should have, and he knew it. Refusing to move mattered, wanting to protect something mattered. He’d begun to grasp that already.

    There’s still more for me to understand.

    Then The Bearer of All Burdens was exhausted, and Klein was charging through, straight toward the person Alden hadn’t even realized he was shielding.

    Lexi followed us?

    Alden hit the floor in a heap of limp yellow webbing. Kon and Finlay were already down.

    Writher snapped and danced through the air angrily, moving as fast as it had been earlier when it had almost seemed like it should be able to touch Torsten Klein. Now...now, Klein was slower. And Astrid, who had apparently been pretending to be dead all this time, was flinging herself at the instructor’s last good leg.

    Knives were falling all around them.

    Good, thought Alden, taking a deep breath as a bright light filled the gym. We did pretty good.

    ******