3

An oracle sat cross-legged on the carpet, a helmet like the skull of an enormous bird shrouding his face. Lit only by the pyre before him and the meager torches along the walls, he reached into a bowl and grabbed several tiny bones, stirring up billowing dirt and dust. Coughing and a sneeze peppered the room around him.

He dropped the bones. They crackled in the fire, and when they broke, they unleashed much more: power in the form of vibrant bolts, a rainbow shivering in the air, to the rhythm of the crackling. The bones could be read, and so could the current, if the oracle was sufficiently trained to absorb the whole pattern in all of six seconds.

The children coughed more loudly now. The smell in the room had grown positively acrid: feathers, scat and blood mixed with the bones had burned too. But Clover didn’t care. She stood at the front of the pack as usual, keenly observing the lesson as usual. And as the oracle reflected, passing his thin hands along the bones, Clover wondered…

Animal magic had been used for as long as humans had the wherewithal to use them: bones polished and hoarded, blood siphoned and drunk, as piercings, clothes, and grafts of skin. The same year Clover’s class was taken to the temple to see the oracle, the Spire was erected in a town not so far away, and raved about as a marvel of the age. It was a power plant, fueling entire livelihoods. It seemed to prove once and for all that magic could be honed for things beyond survival and warfare.

Present-day Clover was caught between two paths as a student: the doctor or surgeon’s and the adventurer-warrior’s. As always, several currents of mundane, plotting thoughts cycled through her head as she made her way to her dorm that late afternoon. One of them weighed the life of a soldier against a mercenary, and the mercenary won every time. Memorizing nigh-endless facts about the body and controlling her most minute movements were among her best skills…but fighting out in the field felt like the real test. Especially after what happened at the bank.

When she opened the door to her dorm, she knew it was a story to tell Tango. The common area connecting four bedrooms was not much more than a kitchen, two chairs, and an expansive window looking out on the trees of campus. Tango had taken one chair and a tiny table over to that window, looking outside like he couldn’t look away.

She took a moment to quietly shut the door, dart into her own bedroom, and feed the parakeet in the cage there. It didn’t shed much, but the few feathers eddying in the air around it would make great fodder for experiments once she settled in to this school—but that was a matter for later. Clover hung up her lab coat and returned to Tango.

“Guess what?” she said, swinging around to the fridge and pulling out a big bottle of chocolate milk, complete with a big red bow. It was amazing how popular milk was here—that and blood shots. “Two things. First, I got you something…”

Swirling across the floor, she passed it on to him like a trophy. He took it, but his expression was stony. He set it on the table.

“Thanks,” he said. “I don’t know if you can afford this.”

“Second,” she went on, “something huge and scary and amazing happened at the student bank today!” Clover threw her hands in the air, acted out the most harrowing moments, and clawed out the innards of an imaginary thief with gusto. Tango watched it all; his expression was stony.

“And I didn’t even learn her name!” Clover rhapsodized. “Curly black hair, red headband, really short. Does she sound familiar?”

“No,” he said bluntly.

“…It doesn’t sound like you enjoyed that.”

“Yeah. I bet it doesn’t.”

She became stony too. “I wish you’d tell me next time. Now I just feel like a dumbass.”

“Maybe you should.” He took a deep breath. “My grandma is dying, Clover. Right now. She’s there and I’m here. I can’t even watch her fucking dying.”

“Well, it...” Clover deliberated, holding his gaze. “It could be worse.”

He sneered. “Yeah, good thing it’s not my actual parents, right?”

“Actually,” she said, “that would be a good way to think about it.”

They were silent. Then Tango took a seething loud breath through his nostrils and turned his whole chair back toward the window. “If you’re just gonna be an asshole, please don’t do it in front of me. Please, just go somewhere else.”

“It’s my dorm,” she snapped.

“You said I was welcome here.”

“You are!”

“Okay, would you rather I leave?”

Well—no! she nearly cried. But her temper could flare in and out as quickly as candles in wind. She tamped it down, loosened her shoulders, and tried a different approach. “Tango, you don’t have to go,” she said, kneeling by his chair and keeping her words slow. “I’m sorry. Just stay here, and I’ll pour you some of this milk, and I’ll do my homework, and you can just relax. Okay?”

His head turned back. His face was still stony. “Do you have anything less sweet?”

Minutes later, she was pouring hot tea—two hot teas, thinking this is what couples do, they’d rather do everything in pairs. Why did it annoy her so much that Tango wanted to leave? Probably because it meant love was leaving.

Just a string of mistakes. She and Tango were supposed to have been taking it slow, weren’t they? She set a cup on his table and moved for her room.

“Wait,” he said. “I wanna ask you something.”

As the sunset faded into evening, their faces became dark and two roommates came in without a word, opening the fridge, passing into their own bedrooms. Clover knew it was wrong to feel attacked—he was just saying how he felt—but as he listed off the things about their short time together that annoyed or dissatisfied him, she did. She felt attacked, accused, and far too vulnerable.

“If you don’t like it, go,” she said.

“…That’s it?”

“You basically said it yourself. I can only work on so much.”

“Yeah. I’m sure. You’re just so busy being amazingly popular. It must be pretty fucking hard for you to concentrate on saying ‘sorry.’”

“I am sorry,” she snapped. Then she took a deep breath. “I’m just not going to be good enough for you.”

“Oh my god, Clover.” Tango buried his face in his hands. “Wow. Poor you.”

That stung. Maybe it should. “Go!” she said at last.

He was out like a light. Then Clover sat where he’d sat, drinking cold tea. It was over so quickly.

They still shared two classes, and they’d have to see each other, but she would no longer—have access to him. The whole pursuit of love looked selfish now, especially her rush to get it. She felt offended that he’d no longer sit by her and jealous of the imaginary force that would claim him instead.

After she’d sat for a while with the amulet squeezed in her fist, it was easier to see things from Tango’s point of view. She didn’t have to be so crass in a time when he was already so hurt.

Clover wasn’t suffering the way he was—in fact, she wasn’t sure if a pain had ever affected her so much that it was written on her face, or heard in her sighs. But truth be told, she felt it would be hard to focus on changing the core of herself, simply because her mind was always engaged in the practical level of how best to bend magic, how to manage her money, how to move up, how to present herself to people she wasn’t at all close to. The game felt too complicated.

Her mind moved nimbly to another topic. The bank, and the girl fighting so vigorously within it. She went to this school, she couldn’t be hard to identify.

It was easier to think about a potential friend than a boyfriend who was now totally off-limits, and thinking through all the ways and places Clover could ask about her gave her a reassuring sense that she was a logical being.

By the time both cups of tea were done, she had a new primary goal—and the person at its nexus was far more fascinating than Tango ever had been.