6-2

After Ed’s false alarm with the nearby bear, Clover took a deep breath in and out. She assured herself there was nothing to be afraid of, that she was strong, and that an unproven fear was irrational. She turned to Carmina, the epitome of fearlessness. She was pulling at her gloves.

“Hey,” Clover murmured, “so how was your day yesterday? And the day before?”

“Oh, superb!” Prof. Dolby craned her head back.

“AAH! PROFESSOR, WATCH THE ROAD!”

“Oh, you clowns. There is no road!” Nonetheless, Clover’s fake terror worked. Prof. Dolby did turn back and man the controls again.

Clover then took a cue from Carmina and lapsed into silence.

The quiet shunking of metal legs through the soft top layer of earth, hidden frogs’ croaks, and the cries of the earliest birds were all they heard for several minutes. Then Prof. Dolby revealed a little more about their reason for being here.

“Today we’re touring the outer reaches of Bearland,” she said. Clover was surprised they’d name it like a theme park. “We search for traces of bears—footprints, leavings, even the stains of berries could be proof they’ve foraged. Then we log them! If it wasn’t for us, these brown beauties wouldn’t be so well-protected.”

“What are the dangers?” Clover asked.

“Poachers or people overhunting. Can you believe some people kill them when they’re babies? The poor things can’t even fight back.” She tsked. “And of course we want them to grow as strong and healthy as possible, before—well—before Melo takes out the proverbial shotgun.”

“Do you ever kill any on the job?”

“Only in self-defense. And of course it’s not me who does it; we have Ed and the lovely Carmina to thank for that service!”

Clover looked over. Carmina wasn’t basking in the compliment. Ed was as moved as a rock. As much as Clover hated to betray their united front, she also wanted to make a good impression.

“Uh, don’t you mean ‘the handsome Ed’?”

“Oh!” Prof. Dolby chuckled. “Where are my manners?”

The sky beyond the trees turned an uneven crimson. Only after a blink did Clover discover that was the bumpy face of a boulder or cliff, the water on its bumps reflecting the headlights like long stars. There was a gaping hole in the middle.

“Here we are!” the professor sang. “Checkpoint number one! Hop out, everyone, all hands on deck!”

Carmina was faster than anyone, slamming the door and whooshing into the cave. Clover considered asking if she was alright, but she didn’t trust Prof. Dolby’s emotional intelligence and she didn’t trust Ed to speak. Somehow this seemed like their everyday procedure.

Prof. Dolby gestured for Clover to walk next to her. Ed held the shotgun against his chest and followed a few paces behind them. The weapon was fairly new to her, and very impressive: kind of a souped-up version of her own crossbow that likewise demanded more power and stability from the user. Since guns were fueled all or in part by gunpowder (obviously), people with little magical aptitude could and did wield them well…but Clover had opted not to touch guns because a “proper” mage turned their nose up at them.

Besides, it was less efficient to alchemize the powder necessary for a single, earsplittingly loud spell than to go out, wring some chicken necks, and pull out the magical bone darts with dinner. (Fortunately, Melo’s cafeteria had a huge pasture and coop out back.)

They stooped through the cave entrance, but found the inside surprisingly expansive. A steady light from an orb in Prof. Dolby’s hand lit the passage. Despite the rank smell of wild animal everywhere, Clover guessed that Carmina’s willingness to charge in was a signal to them all that nothing lived here but harmless vermin.

“This cave was a bear den for centuries!” the professor raved. Her voice bounced on the walls of a chamber about fifteen feet long. The ground wasn’t level, but the stones had long since been shoved against the walls and the dirt floor had been flattened, undulating in smooth waves. Carmina was squatting at the far end, already scooping something up. “The dirt may not look like much, but it’s rich with remains. We have evidence that the bears themselves buried them. Pretty unique even among their species. Even more fortunately for us, they rarely used them.”

Her smile glittered at Clover, who nodded politely but mainly looked away, scanning the walls. Ed stood guard at the entrance. Another passageway curved downward, as if into the depths of the earth.

The professor continued, “But even these bears rarely crack open their bones to the marrow.” This would, of course, release a flare of energy; if the owner of the bones had been athletic and in pitched combat at the time of death, it was more like a small explosion. “If they ever learned proper magic, it’s safe to say we’d have a bearpocalypse on our hands!”

Clover remembered a report of monkeys in a far-off nation interrupting a town hall to steal all the councilmembers’ wands. In their excitement, they howled, waggled the wands, and…nothing happened. They were summarily murdered, their organic matter recycled into, of course, more wands. She gave Prof. Dolby a performative chuckle.

A full burlap bag dropped to the ground where Carmina had once crouched; Clover hadn’t even noticed it before. Then, holding a larger one, Carmina went further down into the depths. Clover and the professor slowly followed.

Mice squeaked and shuffled away from the beams of Prof. Dolby’s light. When Clover had heard this cave doubled as a burial ground, she’d expected a small and shallow pit holding a few scavenged pieces of the dead. This was an archaeological site. This was massive and intentional. A chamber almost twice as wide as the last one spread before them. She couldn’t tell how deep it was, because clearly yards upon yards of earth had been piled atop the original ground surface. Melo Academy’s diggers had started cutting it away, leaving a neat rectangular hole. Within the hole, immersed in dirt, was a staggering amount of bones.

Carmina was squatting at the far end and reaching in, yanking out what looked to be a rib. “Carmina,” the professor yodeled out, “care to tell Clover what you’ve been up to?”

She took her time giving an answer, one that seemed to have come from a cue card. “I’m picking up the bones of middling quality,” she said, “which will…be pounded into meal to…fortify milk.”

“There you go.” Prof. Dolby nodded proudly.

Clover squinted. “Why don’t you mobilize en masse, get all of these bones out immediately?”

“Because we don’t know how much human activity we want in here. See, some people at the Academy want us to loot the whole cave. They’re especially interested in getting at the oldest bones. And I don’t blame them—I am too! But the other camp, we want the bears to come back. There’s a certain amount of eau de bruin you want to leave intact.”

She could fill in a few of the blanks. Leaving the property of the bears totally untouched would never be an option—they needed to get their resources from somewhere.

“I’m guessing they don’t come back because they still smell a little bit of, um, eau de humain…and don’t want to mess with us.”

“Yes, yes. But you know why we make Carmina do the dirty work?”

Clover blinked at that last part, then realized Prof. Dolby was trying to be silly and ironic. “No, why?”

Prof. Dolby held up a fascinated finger. “We do it because she’s so good with wild animals. She came outta the woods, you know.”

Clover looked over at Carmina, hesitantly. This certainly sounded like the professor airing her dirty laundry, in a place where she could hear it, easily. But Carmina was focusing on picking bones out from the edges of the excavation. “…I did not know that,” Clover said. “Literally?”

“Oh, yes, quite literally! Or, well, that’s what she tells us, and it would certainly explain some things. When we found her, she was living on the street. We had to get her food, shelter…mollify her dicier tendencies…”

“What were you saying about her being good with animals?” Clover gestured for her to move on—to something a little less personal. As tantalizing as this was, she would much prefer Carmina ever speak to her again.

“Right! Well, there’s the little things. She knows how not to spook rats, and her nose is really keen. In terms of detecting predators in our path, she and Ed are about even. But she’s half his age! It’s amazing!

“We had a wild encounter a few days ago. You should’ve seen it! A bear ran right up to our vehicle and…powww! Fwooisssh!” Raising her free hand into a whirling claw, she unleashed a torrent of sound effects, each less fitting than the last. “With no warning, it knocked us over. Then it reared up and—squisssh!—it started slashing the front legs! (That’s why our vehicle is so new, we had to get a new one.) Ed had just used his shotgun to scare away some wolves, and he was fresh out.

“That was when Carmina got out of the bug. She walked right in front of that bear and I was scared to death that it would just claw her to pieces. I even worried that she would hurt or kill the bear before Melo Academy wanted it dead—you need a permit for bears, you know.

“For a few seconds, I stayed terrified. That bear was howling. It. Looked. Furious.

“But then,” Prof. Dolby said, mystified, “it was like an emotional one-eighty. Carmina held an arm out, gently, as if asking a cat to scent her fist, and the bear dropped down on all fours. Isn’t that the most amazing thing you’ve ever heard?”

Clover studied the story in silence. She tried to imagine the spider-car tumbling on its side, the shaking trees in the wake of a rampaging beast.

“That does sound amazing, Carmina,” Clover said, raising her voice. “What did you think of it, at the time?”

By now, the red-hooded girl was walking back, carrying a full, heavy sack in both arms. “Eh,” she said. “The ways of animals aren’t that deep. It’s not hard to deal with them if you’re not afraid of a few scars.”

With the way she let the manticore leap bodily onto her…yeah, Clover could believe she’d be so nonchalant.

Before Carmina left the chamber, she stopped beside them, snaked an arm behind her sack, and rolled up her sleeve. On her upper arm, there were nasty scars, wide and deep. Clover knew how well a mage could heal, and she had begun her studies in surgery, but the sight of wounds so thorough was still astounding.

“You left that part out,” Carmina said to the professor.

She smiled. “I didn’t wanna scare her.”

“Why you think you can scare the two strongest mages in school,” Clover said, swinging her arms on her way out the chamber, “is a mystery, Professor…”

As they walked out, Clover realized Ed hadn’t just been standing there motionless. Notes were written on a pad in his hand. What little she caught as she passed was nothing special. “Bears: none.”