9-1

While Clover was lying in bed awake thinking about how increasingly absurd it was for one girl to be here and the other there, and Carmina was sleeping fitfully through a nightmare, Ed was in the bug, baldly yawning.

“No, come out,” Mary Dolby said like he was a misbehaving student. “Closer. You’re gonna miss it.”

He grabbed the shotgun and creeped out. With the headlights off and the night black as pitch, they could hardly see anything except the intermittent flares, tiny, from Dolby’s wand.

They carefully peeked out from behind rocks and bushes to find the perimeter wall. A bear had approached it. Dolby illuminated it with a moonlight glow for a second; the bear was facing away from them.

They were around thirty feet away, maybe far enough to whisper. “I’ve never seen them active at this time of night,” she said. “Have you?”

“Mm-mm. But it doesn’t mean much. Anything can drive ’em out. Weather, other bears…” He winced. “Stress…”

“Very unhelpful, Ed.” He could hear her toothy grin.

“You say it’s been like this?”

“Yep.”

Dolby started her wand again a little brighter, then stuck it between her arm and side, took out a pad, and began to write furiously. Ed did the same for a moment, then looked back at the bear.

It likely hadn’t touched the wall—there were no dents and hardly any debris, and the bear wasn’t even close enough to reach. It was just sitting there. Now and then, it sniffed and pawed the earth.

Dolby tittered. “Fascinating, right? What philosophical implications do you think are lurking behind this—just out of our reach?”

Ed yawned again. She only asked these things because she knew he never graduated anything. “Well,” he said, “a bunch of bears is a trend, but one is just mad. Nobody’s gonna care until then.”

Even then, what would it prove? How would it lead to anything? The Academy had a plan to keep all these bears right where it had them, seed the land with artificial beasts to fight them and get their magic up, then come in the for the harvest. They wouldn’t stop facilitating that just because one bear, or a thousand, looked homesick.

He strongly suspected Mary Dolby brought him out here so she had someone to brainstorm a new neuroscientific paper with, and the thought provoked another yawn.

“But,” he murmured, “if you want a theory, I would not be surprised if that bear were pawing out Morse code.” Some of its thumps were pretty hard, and bears did have keener hearing than humans.

That really made Dolby laugh. She tried to stifle it, eyes flying to the bear. It still hadn’t turned to them. “We shall see, Edward! Much, much more evidence is needed!” Meanwhile, Ed eyed his shotgun.

***

Carmina did not know what to think of Clover’s gaze. She had beautiful, almost yellow eyes, incisive enough to cut. Her dominant mental image of Clover was peering, turning, squinting. She enjoyed asking questions, and most of them really were harmless. The problem was, it seemed to be her favorite activity, outside of her studies. Eventually she would mine deep enough into Carmina that she would hit something essential—but that wasn’t even the heart of the problem. Carmina was used to silent existence. At some point the novelty of speech would wear off, and she would find it tedious again.

Clover lived in for speech and ideas, but Carmina herself was just a visitor. She wondered when Clover would tire of her and hit the limit, her final entertaining thought.

It didn’t seem possible to her that anyone could be kept entertained by her sheer presence. Not without an ulterior motive.

Besides—she thought as she crawled into bed—she was here to eat, sleep, explore within reason, and go. She wouldn’t live her whole life second-guessing the deeper fathoms of other people.

Hours later, sunshine poured through the bare window. A heap of clothes, small but definite, was lit up in all its hills and valleys. Carmina rose on a weekend morning after three separate and tumultuous sleeping sessions.

Many of her dreams were gone by now, but she’d just dreamed that Clover, as sweetly as you please, delicately on a familiar tablecloth, was cutting off Carmina’s fingers and offering them to her. The physical pain was profound, and it echoed through her nerves even now, while nausea rippled in her gut. That part was nothing new. What startled her was mental. She’d felt horrified in a way she would never have if a vision of her birth or foster mother had been dismembering her. Without knowing it, she’d invested enough care, interest, maybe even fascination into another person to feel betrayed. On reflection, she had really betrayed herself.

Clover was a stranger, from a totally different walk of life, born within the system, whom she had let into her life, and Carmina would never know with any confidence what Clover wanted out of her, because Carmina didn’t trust the system.

It was nice to know someone and to present an impression of normal. She’d thought it might be nice to feel human on a deeper level. Now she shivered.

But she’d blown it, and agreed to meet Clover in her dorm a few short buildings away. Carmina got dressed and did some rudimentary grooming.

When the door to the other girl’s building opened, Clover was there in the lobby. She beamed like a lightbulb sparking to life. Past empty wooden chairs she ran, then hugged her. Carmina hooked her arms around her, but in her arms she stared ahead.

What had she gotten herself into?

The contact of a warm body was good. Maybe it was okay to receive it. She eventually squeezed back. Meanwhile, Clover had been rattling off words, and none of them had registered.

Mutually they pulled back. Clover, hands on her shoulders, looked at her with a new kind of admiration. “I think I really did miss you,” she said. “You know, I was afraid I was only lusting after you.”

The phrase was startling. Carmina tried not to think about it, just as she had the first time when Clover’s class note mentioned she was “hot.” “It’s fine,” she said, which she sensed wasn’t the best answer. “Let’s go to your room.”

Clover studied her for another moment, but then, mercifully, they made their way up the stairs. The way was lined with small talk the way a garden path is laid with flowers; Carmina nodded on, barely engaged.

As they came closer to the door, nausea returned. Not the same feeling as from her dream. She could smell something in the air. The typical dorm had a stink to it—every mage had a stink to them—which was just the natural consequence of using so many raw natural products. Bones carried traces of everything they’d been through.

Fur, at least, was washed. It carried too much pestilence not to be. But nobody washed bone.

It was hard to explain how she knew, and maybe, in the end, it was all in her head, but she did not like holding bones because she could feel their stories. Some ended in sickness or old age as the bears and wolves whimpered in their dens, but those were gentle deaths compared to those of the bones used in high-class wands. Those died fighting at their athletic peak. They flushed her forehead, raised her heart rate, and made her eyes search, anxious, newly aware.

Even without holding them, she could smell them. Traces of blood, feathers, acrid chemicals, and a smokey grit came to her from behind Clover’s door. Her own roommates probably never smelled it, but Carmina did. The cocktail reminded her of the hunting trips that wended through the woodland bagging birds, toting wands or rifles. The story in the feathers was more germane. This bird was never shot. He was caught, though, and his parents were dead.

“What’s wrong?” Clover asked.

Without realizing it, Carmina had frozen up. Looking around, she realized Clover had seemingly parked her in front of the door. Maybe there was something about the door she was meant to acknowledge? Say that she liked?

“If I’d known you didn’t want to come up here so bad, I wouldn’t have made you… I’m sorry if this is a burden, but if you don’t want to do something, please be very, very explicit. I’m not gonna know otherwise. I’m just not. So if you…”

Her words fizzled away. Carmina teared up as she stared at the door, hoping that if she stayed facing ahead, she might hide them.

If she told Clover what she smelled, she would never believe it, nor would she let her do what she had to do.

“It’s fine,” Carmina said again. “Let’s go inside.”

“…Really?” Clover giggled. “I’m worried for nothing! Okay, let’s go.”

She reached past Carmina and opened the door to a soulless common dorm. The way to Clover’s bedroom was cracked open. That was where the worst of it was coming from. As Clover was explaining the place, Carmina nodded her words away and marched to the bedroom. Boots clacked after her, but when they caught up, Carmina was already in the center of the floor, swiveling her head, her nose breathing fast and deep.

Clover overflowed with nervous laughter. “It’s so much to take in, right? That’s what I was just saying…”

Why hadn’t Clover stopped her yet? Her fierce hands could swat flies out of the air. Carmina drifted, then ran to the cabinet, hopped down into a squat, and yanked open the bottom drawer to fish around.

“Hey.” There it was, her fierceness.

It was too late. With tears running down her face and into the drawer’s clothes, Carmina pulled out a leather holster. Clover could see her face now as she turned it upward and it hit the window’s light, but it didn’t matter anymore. She kissed the holster, happy that she didn’t have to handle the wand in front of this person and be overwhelmed, maybe sent into shock by the memory.

Clover took her by one shoulder and yanked her from the cabinet. “What is this—”

Already holding the wand two-handed, Carmina reached around and cracked her in the back of the neck. Her mouth opened and her eyes grew wide, but she hardly made a sound. She was simply stunned as Carmina leapt to her feet and dashed for the door.

But she was quick to follow. Carmina overtaxed her leg muscles, lacing them with currents of magic that radiated through skin with a searing ember-glow. Clover could use the same trick, but she hadn’t mentally prepared for this the way Carmina had.

Not that this wasn’t a bolt from the blue for Carmina.

Why? Why would Clover even have this? A wand that she never even used and buried in her sock drawer just for safekeeping? It was convenient for her, because it meant she didn’t have to keep sitting in public places, or start going to parties, sniffing the air in search. It was also inconvenient because she could never show her face to her again.

How stupid would she look if she told her you have my mother’s bone?

She wondered if Clover would make up for the distance between them by firing crossbow bolts as they charged down the stairs, but she wasn’t that ruthless. Instead, she began to raise her voice and say something, but was cut off by a distant peal.

“—shit,” Carmina heard. It was a siren.