7-1

Clover and Melissa downed their shots at the same time, or so Melissa thought.

Her coughing could barely be heard over the chatter and groans of three dozen young mages. Melissa whirled around to the girl next to her on the couch with a look of utter betrayal.

“Wow, you did it!” Clover said—total calm.

“I didn’t wanna do it alone!”

“Are you gonna take that? Are you just gonna let it happen?” slurred some voice behind them. People were leaning across the walls, tables, top of the couch. One hand was fiddling with the end of Clover’s lab coat, and that was probably the guy who kept saying she came in wearing a bathrobe.

While Melissa was stuttering a reply, Clover slowly hoisted her shot above her head, making sure everyone could see, that the suspense could build…and dumped it over her. Her mouth went wide in horror, amid more laughter and sympathetic groans. Clover stuck out her tongue and cackled in her face.

Melissa started laughing too as she brushed the wet hair away from her forehead. “I hate you,” she said.

The next morning, six interminable hours later, Clover—back in the safety of her dorm and the soft place to fall that was a reliable five-day schedule—found herself thinking, I HATE ALL OF YOU!

She blinked. Not even she could tell if that was a joke.

Rolling off her bed, she whimpered to see if that would get the dismal feeling out of her head and stomach. It didn’t. She didn’t even drink much last night, and had studiously avoided downing anything that wasn’t explicitly girly, yet here she was. And as she wobbled on her feet, she remembered her fear of losing control. Not because she’d go wild, but because she’d lose her poise. As stupid as she looked sometimes, there was a method to it.

Begrudgingly she left her room to grab milk from the fridge. Then she returned. With a class at noon, she could afford to take her time waking up.

…Wait. That clock said “eleven.”

Well, she would just work quickly. There were things she didn’t want to put off any longer.

It was easy to forget that she was wrapping up a research project on medieval times, preparing for her first mock surgery, and memorizing the ins and outs of several historically relevant fighting styles for a verbal exam. The state of her room was already unfortunate enough: the mat and weight plates competed for space with her backpack and a few outfits that needed to hang outside the tiny drawers, not in them. But now with the exams, her desk was sloppy with piles of books and papers—it had reached a state she’d sworn her desks would never reach. She almost shuddered.

On top of that, she was making waves in the friendship quadrant of her life. It was true that she had no confidantes, nobody she would always walk home with, no roommate she offered more than “how’s the weather”-type conversation, no regular hangout besides her job. But she was a known name, and anybody who wasn’t jealous seemed to be curious and amused. Clover was once again seeing the advantages of keeping pretty much nobody close. What were careless flubs in her child self had been transmuted into strategic attacks—like pouring a drink on an acquaintance’s head. In the back of everyone’s mind, they were saying, “Don’t mess with Clover.”

But she felt like the richest man in the world who was missing one fateful thing. It was melodramatic, but yes, she needed the heart of a maiden. And it had to be a specific maiden. Nobody else had interested her; she knew now that normal, normal Tango was not an outlier, but one of the very numerous pack.

The window was thrown open. A chemical stink wafted out between the panes, blown by a Spire-powered fan.

While her lab coat was simmering in a washbasin of basic soap and water, Clover got to the more enthralling work of distilling Winster’s feathers into a compound that magicians might find useful. She was momentarily distracted by the miracle of modern science as she used a bowl to combine the organic debris with a naturally enhanced, sizzlingly corrosive substance to create…to create…

Once the solution was no longer steaming, Clover sucked it up into an eyedropper. It barely filled it, and the liquid within was both murky and neon-green. She figured that’s what you get when you use something radioactive. Still, performance enhancements like this were legal, and she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t intrigued. Like her too-precious bear wand, she would store it in the bottom of a cabinet for safekeeping.

Now…

As she whipped her lab coat dry (taking care to splatter the droplets toward her bed and the window, and never, ever over her desk), she wondered, of course, about Carmina. Not even about what she liked, but about the core of it. What she was doing here.

Some students came to the Academy as part of a grand strategy and the others simply floated into it. Or were pushed—which one would think happened to Carmina. But she didn’t handle herself like a drifter. Was Clover stupid for thinking that? Was she just assuming?

After eating a quick, late breakfast of boiled eggs, Clover returned to her room to pace—the chemical traces somehow ordered her thoughts. Carmina wasn’t here because learning just made her feel alive. She was a serious person; she had come here for money or power.

She didn’t come alive in her work. When she talked in snippets about the future, it was not only vague, but restrained. She didn’t move with despair. She had drive.

She didn’t allow herself to wander. When Clover had passed her a note one morning asking if she liked to go any places on campus, Carmina had sent it back with only a “no.” On the subject of hobbies, Carmina wrote “no.” So what did she do in her spare time? She wrote, “Nothing.” Did she like anything? “Flowers. Food.” She was incorrigible. That or she was doing some pointed nudging, but Clover doubted she could manage that kind of social finesse.

***

Thanks to a schedule in her binder, a schedule freely given, she knew exactly where to find Carmina. On her way to Carmina’s last class that afternoon, crossing the commons, she stopped.

The yellow sun glanced off the edge of the Spire as a burning crescent. Clover looked up, knowing the image wouldn’t last.

For a glimmer of a moment, she looked at the Spire with the eyes of a real bleeding heart.

She had made a conscious choice at a very young age not to think about the sheer quantity of other animals’ organs it took to run the engine of her world, or the fact that every oracle bone came from a body. To her, everyone was a hypocrite, but there wasn’t such a vast difference between a human and any animal; to her, at some point you were shouting “hypocrite” at the circle of life.

But no one could deny the basic truth that living involved causing others pain. And if you loved the woods very deeply, she figured, then maybe that big monstrous Spire was the sword hanging over you.