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The Dragon’s Eye was cursed, as Maleficent had told her, which meant that anyone who touched it would immediately fall sleep for a thousand years. That had always been her mother’s specialty—putting people to sleep against their will. Of course, that hadn’t exactly worked out during the Sleeping Beauty debacle, but that didn’t mean that the Dragon’s Eye staff would be any less powerful now. When Mal found the scepter she would have to take care not to touch it, and then to figure out a way to somehow bring it back without awakening the curse.
If it still works.
If I find it.
If it exists at all.
As Mal picked up her backpack, she only felt worse. Even dumping an extra spray can into her bag didn’t lift her spirits.
Maybe Jay was right.
Maybe this whole quest was too silly to even embark on. She didn’t know where to begin to find her mother’s lost weapon, no matter how powerful it once had been.
Who was she to think she could find something that had been lost for so long? Maybe she should just forget about it and go back to her usual routine of tagging and shoplifting.
Besides, it wasn’t as if anything Mal could do would change how her mother saw her. Even if she did succeed in finding the Dragon’s Eye, Mal knew she couldn’t help who her father had been, and in the end that was what Maleficent could never forgive nor forget.
The one thing Mal herself could never fix.
So why bother?
Why try?
Maybe she should just accept it and move on. That’s what her mother expected from her, anyway.
To fail. To disappoint. To give up. To give in.
Just like everyone else in this place.
Mal pulled open the castle door and set out for school, trying not to think about it.
Like many nerds before him, Carlos liked school. He wasn’t ashamed to admit it—he would have told as much to anyone who bothered to ask. Since no one did, however, he reviewed the argument himself.
He liked the structure and the rules of school. He liked the work, too—answering the kinds of questions that had answers, and exploring the ones that didn’t. While there were parts of school that were torture, like when he was forced to run the length of the tombs in gym (why practice fleeing on foot when they lived on an island?) or when he had to work with assigned partners (usually the kind who teased him for not being able to run the length of the tombs in gym), the other parts more than made up for it.
Those were the good parts—the parts where you actually used your brain—for which Carlos liked to think he was better equipped than the average villain.
And he was right.
Because Carlos De Vil’s brain, by way of comparison, was almost as big as Cruella De Vil’s fur-coat closet.
That’s what Carlos tried to tell himself, anyway, especially when people were making him run the tombs.
His first class today was Weird Science, one he always looked forward to. It was where he’d originally gotten the idea to put his machine together, from the lesson on radio waves. Carlos was not the only top student in the class—he was tied, in fact, with the closest thing he had to a rival in the whole school: the scrawny, bespectacled Reza.
Reza was the son of the former Royal Astronomer of Agrabah, who had consulted with Jafar to make sure the stars aligned on more than one nefarious occasion, which was how his family had found their way to the Isle of the Lost with everyone else.
Weird Science was the class where Carlos always worked the hardest. The presence of Reza, who was every bit as competitive in science lab as he was, only made Carlos work that much harder.
And as annoying as everyone found Reza to be—he always had to use the very biggest words for everything, whether they were used correctly and whether he was inserting a few extra syllables where they might or might not belong—he was still smart.
Very smart. Which meant Carlos enjoyed besting him. Just the other week they had been working on a special elixir, and Reza had been annoyed that Carlos had figured out the secret ingredient first.
Yeah, Reza was almost as smart as he was irritating. Even now he was raising his hand, waving it wildly back and forth.
Their professor, the powerful sorcerer Yen Sid, ignored him. Yen Sid had been sent to the Isle of the Lost from Auradon by King Beast to teach the villain kids how to live without magic and learn the magic of science instead. Carlos remarked once that it must have been a huge sacrifice for him to give up Auradon, but the crotchety old wizard shrugged and said that he didn’t mind and that he had a responsibility to teach all children, good or bad.
Yen Sid resumed their lesson by quoting his favorite phrase, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The secretive magician smiled from his lectern, his bald head glowing under the light, and his large, gray beard covering half his chest. He had traded in his sorcerer’s robes for a chemist’s white coat, now that there was no market in magic, and…well, no magic to speak of.
