Zero Sight (36 page)

Purity required an empty mind. Mental images could contaminate the flow and render the mana worthless for the larger spell. The meditation techniques Jules had me practicing daily came into play here, and those sessions were paying off. Within a week, I was getting it right about half the time.

“
Good enough for a grub,” Jules said.

Quantity was the larger problem. Each part of Jules’ spells required a set amount of mana. Like in baking, quantities were critical. Where my natural ability to collect mana made setting up extraction fields simple, it worked against me here. Jules said I was like the volume control on an airplane headset. I had two settings: Very Hi and Very Low. Even three weeks in, Jules had to go through all my circles and bleed off mana. But I was learning, I was getting better, and that was good enough for me.

I blew breath over my freezing hands. It was 2AM in the morning, one week before Halloween, and Jules and I were hovering over a rose bush.

“
Cut it clean, Dieter.”

“
Stars above, Jules. I’m using shears, how could I
not
cut it clean?”

“
Oh, you’ll find a way. I’m sure a’that ya butcher.”

I snipped off the stem and took a knee.

“
For you, my love. A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet as your feet.”

Jules smacked me on the back of the head.

“
Oi! Cut the crap, Dieter. Put the rose in the workspace and get ta the extractions. The longer we wait the harder it’ll be ta re-fuse.”

I rubbed my freezing fingers together. Tonight’s assignment was to graft a cut rose back onto it’s stem. The dean had handed Jules and I this special assignment in place of helping with Lambda’s Man-Dough project. If we could re-fuse a rose, maybe with fifty years more work, we could re-attach an arm like the pros did for Susan Collins. Fixing plants is much easier than fixing folks. Veggies are resilient. They don’t mind if you accidently lop off a few leaves. Humans? Not so much.

Tonight, I was in charge of setting up the extraction fields, and as usual, volume control was an issue. Standing over the first circle, I tried for the nice steady strand of mana sweeping through the ground below me. I came up with the Big Whopper instead. The power surged, and the circle groaned in protest. Dust started whipping up around me. I struggled to dump the flow, but I was too slow about it. The surge cascaded into the adjacent transmutation where Jules was working. The surge overloaded it, the spell ruptured, and Jules jumped backwards as the field discharged where her face had just been. Her robe kicked up of the ground and blew over her head.

“
Fockin’aye, Dieter!” she exclaimed.

I had no energy to spare on a response. I was still struggling to force the massive boulder of mana back into place. The rose at the center of the trefoil withered to dust. The blades of grass around it doubled in size.

“
Awen’s Ghost…” Jules eyed the bizarre transmutation. “You’re about as delicate as Shiva.”

“
A little bit of help?” I asked through a grimace.

“
Aye. Aye.” Jules hustled over to bleed the flow.

A beautiful stream of flame sprung from her hand into the night air.

“
Oooh, violet,” I remarked, watching the brilliant purple geyser soar high above the tree line. “That’s a new color, right?”

Jules looked at me in exasperation. “That it is, Dieter. And you know what? That’s officially the last color in the fockin’ rainbow. I’ve diffused so many of yer near disasters that I’ve mastered every last hue.”

“
Maybe you should try for a rainbow next time. We could lure a Leprechaun. Get us some gold.”

Jules planted her hands on her hips. Her ill-fitting spectacles slid down to the tip of her nose. “Haven’t you been doing yer readings? Like we would want to be attracting one a’them shysters.”

“
Oh. Right.” Leprechauns had a rather bad reputation for mischief. They did little stuff like swipe your bankcard and liquidate your assets. Professor Simons estimated that they were responsible for at least half the identity thefts in the United States alone. To me, Leprechauns seemed rather harmless. Then again, I had nothing worth stealing.

Jules began massaging her temples. “Dieter, that’ll be enough for tonight. We’re out of roses—and I need a drink.” Jules walked to the edge of the clearing and yanked the tarp off a collection of tanks and tubes, grabbed two plastic cups, and after a few pumps of a plunger, filled them full of imported Irish ale. It had taken Jules some doing to get a keg of her hometown ale shipped all the way across the Atlantic, but Ms. Nelson was nothing if not persistent.

“
But, milady, what of the purity of yer vessel?” I asked in my best Irish accent.

“
Dieter Resnick, any hope of purity died when you arrived on the scene,” Jules replied in a perfect Midwestern drawl.

“
Proud product of the City of Sin, me darlin’,” I said, accepting a brew.

“
Let’s get going. It’s nearly three, and I’ve got an exam tomorrow.”

We gathered our things for the trek back to campus. Jules and I trudged through the moist multicolor leaves that carpeted the ground. Growing up in a desert, I didn’t think much of the seasons. It got a bit cooler, then it got a bit warmer, but not so much as a leaf changed. East Coast seasons were another story. They went all out. Full costume changes and whatnot. No expense was spared. So far I had watched the dark greens of summer transition to the reds, yellows, and browns of fall. Soon, I would get to see my first snowstorm.

Sleeping Giant forest was a truly beautiful place, so beautiful that it had been designated a state park. The craggily mountain that the park was named after loomed off in the distance. Dante said you could climb to the top of it and see for miles. (I’d never done so. Jules made good and sure any free time I had was spent training.) Sleeping Giant forest was also a great place to practice magic. No camping was allowed, and all the normal visitors had to leave the parking lots by dusk. From then on, Elliot students had the few square miles of forest all to themselves. There were practice facilities all over the place, but I’d only visited the Woodworks.

I paused for a moment, my shoulders sagging. We’d been doing this crap for three months…

“
You know, Jules, I don’t think I’m cut out for this kind of work.”

Jules giggled. “What a remarkable conclusion, professor. Of course yer not. That’s the point. Without addressing yer weaknesses, yer never goin’ ta get anywhere.”

“
And
after
we get this volume issue under control?”

“
Then I can finally get some work done! Greggs is up my arse about this rose fusion bit as it be.”

My frown deepened. Jules was right. I wasn’t the only one suffering. Training me was eating up all of Jules’ time too.

She gave me a playful shove. “I just be jesting, ya thicko. I ain’t plannin’ on breakin’ up our little coven. After we fix the volume thing, we start refinin’ yer craft. You know, expand on what yer good at.”

“
Says the adept to the initiate.”

“
Hey now, Dieter, don’t be that way. It takes me about a minute to set up an extraction—and I’ve been trainin’ since I was a toddler. You waltzed onto campus and turned Central’s basement into a sugary ocean on yer very first try.”

I pulled off my wool cap and mussed up my hair. “What can I say? Me mongo. Me smash.”

“
Na, that be a sack-a-bull, Dieter. You may not be able to control yer quantities yet, but yer executin’ an extraction
every
darn time. That’s more consistent than that Tiger Woods be at free throws.”

I cringed. Sports weren’t Jules Nelson’s strong suit.

“
Thanks for the encouragement, Jules, but I…” That was strange…I looked left and right. “Hey, Jules? Do you feel something funny?”

Jules stopped walking and listened. We were at the fringe of the forest looking across the lawns at the school dorms, but the once familiar space felt…off. The flows of mana are part of the natural landscape. You’d notice if I were to remove a tree from out front of your house. The same goes for mana. Jules and I knew this forest well. We walked it every night. I could sense the magical fortifications and counter-hexes as they drew power from the leyline (didn’t know what they did, mind you, but I could sense them). I could feel the rumbling leyline as it rolled through the bedrock just beneath my feet. And I could notice when something was altered. Right now, it felt like someone had rearranged the deck chairs on our front porch.

A branch cracked, and an owl fluttered off into the night. Grabbing my shoulder, Jules dropped us both into a crouch. Good rule of thumb: if the animals spook, so should you.

“
Féach,” Jules whispered. She pointed into the mist ahead of us.

The hair rose on the back of my neck. Jules rarely slid back into Gaelic. I strained my eyes against the light sheet of fog. Failing at that, I threw more energy into my Sight at the expense of my hearing and smell. I let out a steamy breath. There where five darkened figures hustling away from IKΛM. They were dressed entirely in black—and were heavily armed.

“
What the hell?” I whispered.

“
Something’s not right,” Jules whispered back. “They don’t look like students.”

No shit, Sherlock.

“
That, or we’re going to have to give Maria a hard time for not scoring us some grenades and body armor.”

The five men hustling across the lawn collected around a sixth. He wore a dark black robe, and I could sense the magic on him. He was working an incantation. As we watched in silence, a slit appeared in the air in front of him.

“
A translocation?” Jules whispered. “Translocation magic isn’t supposta be possible inside Elliot’s gates. A ton of counters are cocked’n ready. That’s why Maria’s paella-portation failed. You should have seen it, Dieter. The neddy nearly lost her arm for her troubles.”

I had never seen a translocation before, but whatever the mage was casting was consuming some serious energy. No wonder we had sensed it. The slit in the air quivered. The ethereal blue edges began to peel apart—but the air seemed resistant to the effort. The mage poured forth even more mana from the leyline. He was dousing the incantation with a fire hose, but even then, the slit only peeled open slightly. Cursing, the mage grasped at something around his neck. For a single instant the blue light emanating from the gate flashed across the ruby red pendant.

“
ACT,” I said in shock. “Jules, that son of a bitch has an ACT device.”

“
How the hell do ya know about artificial conduits?” Jules exclaimed. “I haven’t even covered that topic in
Advanced Countermeasures
.” Her eyes narrowed. “Are ya hidin’ books from me?”

“
The tall man, Jules. The mage Rei killed in New York. That dude had one.”

Jules’ eyes widened. “Bloody hell, Dieter. Are ya sayin’ these are the people behind Lucas’ death?”

“
Bingo.”

Jules ran a shaking hand through her tangled blond frizz. Taking her pack off, she fished out the small red book entitled:
In Case of Emergencies
. My own heart was beating in the high double digits. I had been so buried in my studies that I hadn’t spent much time pondering the goings on of the outside world. Sure, oodles of rumors had been floating around; I just figured that they were about as reliable as the ones going around about Rei and me. But as Jules and I crouched in the leaves, I deeply regretted not at least reading the Conscious papers…

I shook my head clear. This was no time for mulling over regrets. The blue gap was growing wider. Despite the invisible opposition of Elliot’s wards, the mage was making progress.

As Jules shuffled through the pages, a sudden energy rebound issued from the gate. With a crackle, the portal snapped closed, and the mage landed on his ass. I smirked. The wards surrounding the campus had given the mage a love tap. From their gestures, I could tell his compatriots were none too pleased. One of the five was yelling something while pointing at his watch. It didn’t sound like he was speaking English.

What was the rush? I wondered. The man pointing at his watch looked different from the others. He had a much smaller weapon, and he was carrying two bulky satchels…

“
Oh,” I muttered. Panic crackled through my bones. I grabbed Jules by the shoulders. She was still struggling to read the manual in the dark. “Jules, listen to me. You need to do one thing and one thing only: You need to run as fast as you can, get to IKΛM, and pull the fire alarm. We need to get everyone the hell away from the dorms.”

Jules glanced at the man wearing the satchels. Realization dawned across her face. “Awen’s Ghost,” she muttered. “Those are just like the ones the Provos used ta use. But, Dieter, how are ya gonna—”

“
Don’t worry about that. There isn’t time. I’ll set up the diversion. You’ll know it.”

I didn’t give her any time to argue. Jules tended to think too much. I ran off through the tree line moving at an angle from the group of men. To be honest, I was scared shitless. I hated guns. Guns shot bullets, and I hated bullets even more than I hated guns. But I needed to give Jules a window. She had to get our classmates out of the building. We probably still had some time. In my last encounter with these bastards, they seemed really concerned with secrecy. Why else would they have wiped the tall man’s mind of any information that could lead DOMA back to them? These guys were pros. They would have added some cushion into their calculations, enough time for them to escape without a trace. I prayed I was right. Otherwise, I had just sent Jules to her death.