He swirls his fingers through the air in a complicated figure-eight pattern, and all of a sudden the screen is projected into midair, suspended like a slightly translucent billboard. The projection shows the plans and blueprints, magnified, and he spends some time swiping through them.
I watch him, fascinated. It’s incredible, really, how everyone here seems to so casually wield their magic. Conall’s family isn’t super wealthy—hedoesroom in my dorm wing, after all—but from what I can gather, they’re comfortably middle-class. Well-off enough, at least, to use magic on a whim. For someone like me, who’s always had to carefully control my magic quotas, it’s such an unfamiliar concept.
His eyes are two bright sparks as he finally turns to me. “Whatarethese? Where did you get them?” There’s barely leashed excitement quivering in his voice. “And more to the point…how?”
“I…well…I can’t say how I got them, sorry. But they’re from Magecorp HQ. Can you read them?”
Conall’s gaze swivels back to the magnified blueprints. This time, when he speaks, he allows the excitement to fully fizz over. “Gwen, these are amazing! I’ve no idea what dark magic you did to get your hands on them, but everything is here: how to open portals, how to keep them open, how to harvest the magic that comes through…This is bloodybrilliant.”
The blueprints are tapping into Conall’s innate love for the hard sciences, and my heart twists, wondering whether he might’ve stuck with engineering if circumstances had been different.
“I didn’t even realize magic came from multiple portals,” he murmurs. “I thought it came from mines.” With one finger, he reverently traces the lines in midair. “Do you think this is related to the surge?”
Surge.Singular. Conall’s only experienced one, and doesn’t know about the others—the media has been busy telling everyone whathappened at the charity gala was the result of a terrorist attack, and someone powerful has managed to quash all mentions of the rest. But even this one surge has impacted Conall in a big way. He lost his familiar, Gary; he lost his best friend.
“I think so,” I say, and even though my voice is quiet, it lands heavily in the hush of the room. “I’m trying to…work out why it happened and whether there’s a way to prevent one from ever happening again.”
Conall’s eyes are distant—he’s clearly working things out in his head. When he speaks again, he speaks slowly, rubbing at one of his elbows. “According to these plans, once a portal is torn open, the tear is held in place by using some sort of…tether. An object, I think. It probably needs to be quite magically powerful to tether open a hole in reality.”
My stomach flips. A tether. If someone is tearing open too many holes, is it because they’ve got hold of a tether? And if so, if there is indeed a rogue tether being used to sabotage Magecorp, could someone like me steal it back? Without knowing what the tether is, I can’t be sure.
A twinge of guilt twists itself into my gut. Perhaps Harrisford’s dad was telling the truth all along: that Magecorp aren’t at fault but are, in fact, the ones being sabotaged.
Now, at least, we have something else to investigate—and I don’t even need the assistance of a certain pompous, annoying blond.
After supper, Conall and I head to the common room, earning ourselves a slew of strange looks. I understand why: While Conall is sociable in his own quiet way, I almost never frequent any of Heywood Hall’s communal areas. In fact, the closest I usually get to mixing with other people is when I pull long study sessions at the library.Even then, I try to secrete myself in a hidden corner and talk to other people as little as reasonably feasible.
I mean, humans are disgusting, right?
But tonight I have a singular aim: Search the common room with Conall to see if there’s anything vaguely resembling a tether, the theory being that it might still be in the vicinity after causing such a huge explosion. The thing is, it’s difficult when we have no idea what to look for. The one saving grace is that Harrisford is happily absent, and nowhere to be seen.
To avoid suspicion, we wait until the room is mostly empty—the majority of the students having gone to bed—before we perform a thorough search. Pen joins us, after their rostered evening check of the hospital patients. They tell us Matilda the Norwegian Forest Cat is doing well, which is a huge relief.
We search beneath couch cushions, flip back all the rugs, run our hands along the filigree-patterned wallpaper. I rummage through the games cupboard, and Conall searches all the bookshelves, but none of us finds anything remotely useful. While all the objects are completely coated with magical traces—residual life force from the other students’ use of them, none of them have any echoes of being magical itself. The only actual sources of magic here are two Magecorp-branded MagePoints—which, unlike typical electrical power points, you need to pay to plug into—that are set into the far back wall.
At one o’clock in the morning, after hours of searching, we’re finally forced to acknowledge defeat and retire to our rooms. I’m exhausted; I’ve worked a full day and conducted an investigation at night, and I’m not even yet fully healed. As I struggle into myTwilightT-shirt, I wince a little—some of the bruises are a little tender—and briefly regret not letting Harrisford treat the rest of my injuries.
No, I scold myself.Don’t eventhinkthat.I don’t want Harrisford-fucking-Briggs to touch me ever again. He might be attractive—asmuch as I hate to admit it—but he’s a slimy, conniving git with all the personality of a broken pencil.
Why are you so late?Percy asks me from where he’s sleeping on my bed. His ears twitch as I pull out my toothbrush and begin to brush my teeth.
“I was searching for a source of the magic surges in the common room,” I say, scrubbing at my teeth unnecessarily hard. I pause—suddenly picturing my dentist’s spiel about enamel wear—then start brushing again, softer this time. “We think that maybe someone is trying to sabotage Magecorp.”
Someone’s sabotaging Magecorp?There’s undisguised glee in Percy’s mind-voice.My megalomaniac ex-owner’s company?
I rinse and spit. “That’s the one.” Leaning over the sink, I splash water onto my face, then towel-dry it off.
Percy sits up and fixes his bright yellow eye on me.Wasn’t it you? Weren’t you there over the weekend, breaking in?
I sigh. “No, it wasn’t me. I have no idea who it could be.”
Percy gives a disappointed sigh, then lies back down, his head positioned very precisely at the center of my pillow.
I frown. Was that the only reason Percy helped me? So he could get back at Nathaniel Price?
Waving away that unpleasant thought, I slide my feet out of my slippers. I stand there, my feet sinking into the wiry carpet, twisting the towel with both hands.
It has suddenly occurred to me that, once upon a time, Percy had a front-row seat to all of Nathaniel’s thoughts and actions.
