9-2

When they reached the lobby, the person at the desk was calling out, “All mages prepare for—”

Carmina pushed out the door and kept running. She held the bone pinned to her chest, hardly looking up. The siren continued. More people were out on campus. The feet she saw were also hurrying.

Whatever kind of emergency this was, it could work for her. Either she could escape campus or go further in. She elected to get lost in the sea of people—even if she tried to leave, she suspected a crowd might herd her around if it grew big enough. Even if she succeeded in leaving, one well-known mystery girl leaping away from a throng could make a headline. She’d rather not. Just please let her and everyone else forget she ever attended this school.

Carmina looked up to change direction. Pain lanced through her ankle suddenly, and she stumbled with a groan. It was such a deep pain that it almost tore through her whole foot—and she looked down to see the last aura tendrils of a yellow-white crossbow bolt.

She started to run again, the force of the first step hammering through her heel. Clover caught her by the arm.

This was another fear she had. To be caught, caged. She didn’t know how she would escape a town with a whole damn wall around it. She wouldn’t think about it.

Breaking away with a whip of her arm, rippling with red aura, Carmina then twisted around and ran.

Clover’s words were no use. She herself forgot them as soon as they were out.

Then Clover, briefly, was standing and watching.

Clumps of students were racing ahead. She’d heard from snippets that everyone was racing toward the Academy’s center, mobilizing to prepare for—something. Some violence.

 She was much more concerned about Carmina. What had she been saying? “Fuck you”? Because that’s the type of thing you say when you’re hurt and betrayed? She didn’t even know if this was betrayal. It was just strange. To think Carmina might be a petty criminal. But a single wand, even unused, even from a bear, couldn’t be worth all this.

She couldn’t think of a reason why this happened. Other than that this girl wasn’t who she thought, she didn’t like her as much as she thought, she was ambitious, she wanted an edge, she wanted to dethrone Clover and make her the idiot for having ever opened herself up. Clover should take her amulet and throw it in the dirt.

But time was passing. Carmina couldn’t possibly be that far ahead. Clover would not let her get away, but this time it was for pride. She let one get away, and she wouldn’t let another leave that easily, wouldn’t be shown up. She gritted her teeth and charged in, though she’d lost sight of Carmina completely.

As she ran and the people began to press shoulder to shoulder through alleys, empty out and scatter forward, press together again, Clover saw and heard things, and the picture grew clearer. People kept saying, “The Vault…to the Vault.” Half their weapons were at the ready, though they hadn’t seen any threats yet. “They’re coming out of the Vault,” she heard, and that conjured up images of a slime outbreak leaking from a lab, threatening all the resources they had down there.

Then, in a thin space between buildings, the crowd she was in slowed and stopped. A head shoved against her back, and she elbowed it away. She had half a mind to shoot the people in front and break through, but sense stopped her—that and baffling noises. Snarls, not human.

A wet, crackling, bashing sound ended the snarling. “Come on!” said a voice ahead, and then they ran again. Clover almost stumbled on a shape like a hairy log. Its brain had been opened like a watermelon.

It was wrong to see a wolf anywhere but in the forest and in the Coliseum. So wrong that it began to feel uncanny. The animal itself hadn’t been scary. The fact that she’d thought for a moment that it was a log, though, lingered with her.

All throughout, the siren kept wailing. It probably came from the Spire—and fortunately, the Spire sat very close to the Bone Vault. As the mages ran closer to their goal, the din pounded louder in their ears. So loud that Clover was surprised so many mages would follow the sound on a weekend, but she supposed a lot of people in this line of study wanted to be heroes.

Besides, the crowds weren’t as numerous as they’d felt when she was running in the thick of things. Now that they’d reached the school’s Essential Quad, everyone slowed down and spread out. The first thing Clover noticed was that out of around four hundred mages gathered on the broad plain and network of stone walkways around the big but nondescript Bone Vault, very few were charging into action. Clumps of them, however, were standing like satellites at different points around the Vault, armed and watchful.

So she assumed they were waiting for whatever this threat was to come barreling out of the place…and with all these people watching, nobody would mind if she spent all her time searching for Carmina.

Across the vast courtyard, even a scarf of the brightest red was hard to pick out. Clover tried anyway whilst dashing through, constantly scanning the people in every direction.

Sounds of firing started, but she couldn’t see the action clearly until she broke through into the divide from one crowd to the next.

A stag, antlers brilliant in the sun, made an arcing sprint through the nodes of mages. It looked like they were playing a children’s game: stand in place and tag the one in the middle when they run by. In this case, they fired, hasty bullets of light unloaded, as many as they could manage. Blood sprayed from the pelt. But the stag got away, bypassing the mages who guarded a marble gate by simply jumping over the gate.

Clover paused to look towards the Bone Vault and saw more activity than she had realized at first: broken windows and holes in the ground, one of the latter watched over by a pacing mage who kept a foot on the board that covered it. As if a wooden board would stop…what, a rampage of deer?

Then a cry rose up. Indistinct, but its tone suggested a sergeant. Clover tamped down an urge to raise her crossbow and prepare with the rest of them; she was still amongst the bystanders.

A wall of the Bone Vault burst apart. The hulking forms of bears ran through. The last volley of a fireworks show dwarfs the rest, and in the same way, a searing-white flurry burst from the weapons of all the fighters present. Dozens of bears fell in the onslaught. Some spells even came from the roof of the Vault, spiraling down with a whistle. Still a few animals escaped, not making a sound on the journey beyond the tread of their huge paws on earth, climbing less gracefully atop the wall and then past it.

More and more it dawned on Clover how bizarre this was. She supposed the people in front couldn’t stop long to think about it. Even now they were dealing with raving bears that had survived yet stayed behind. These growled for their lives.

She’d expected that to be the final volley for both sides, but the strange parade streaming from the Vault continued for several minutes. More animals came, some headbutting through the ground like moles, always sprinting, some deer zigzagging and dodging.

As she went back to racing through the crowd, more and more she found it futile. Carmina just had too many places, too many ways to lose her. Clover stopped in a crowd, distracted by the trail of grayish litter she saw past their shoulders on the battlefield.

Dead animals crashed to the ground and dropped their payload. Seemingly they had flowed out of the Vault with all the pillage they could carry—which wasn’t much. Often it was a single bone spotted in the grass right around their open mouths. Meaning the ones in the front who were making a mad dash for the city limits were holding their own bones, pathetically, knowing that of all the goods they’d attempted to take, they were carrying one percent of one percent.

Another indistinct sergeant-cry rang out, only lower and softer. It had probably said “at ease.” Animals hadn’t come from the Vault in a good few minutes, so the groups of fighters dissolved and clean-up began. A few pocketed fallen bones and hurried away, but the smart ones, Clover knew, had been pocketing them since they first got here. She should have done the same.

As the bystanders around her drew closer to the Vault, offering help, Clover sped to the front just to preserve the look of things in her memory. There were corpses here and there on the ground. She was surprised to find a few human bodies now being lifted up by knees and elbows.

“…and went after him,” someone said. There wasn’t much chatter going on, so even a mumble like this stuck out.

Clover came closer, and she and two strangers who might have been friends walked toward the scene together. She said, “Who did, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Did you see the first death?”

“We don’t know if he died.”

Blinking, Clover shook her head.

“Well, one of the first things that happened is through that window”—they pointed—“a bear came running out. And then with the glass all over it, it tackled this student who was just walking by.”

“We were having lunch right over there!” The other person pointed. One of the outdoor tables of a nearby cafe was now overturned.

“Yeah! And we were turning around right when it clamped down on his leg. It started dragging him along! You know that wall they were climbing over?” Clover looked back at it as if she might forget. Marble walls, six feet high and mostly decorative, intermittently framed the plaza. This one was cracked in places. “It climbed over the wall, with him still in its mouth. I gagged.”

“And then another mage started running and went after him.”

“Yeah!”

Another stranger interrupted as he walked past, with a flat, dismal voice. “Could you not talk about this like you’re excited, please.”

The first two didn’t know what to say after that. They watched Clover expectantly, maybe for confirmation that it had been a great, horrific story.

Indeed it was, but she was kind of distracted right now, and said as much. They interpreted it as a trauma response, though the sight of dead bodies only bothered her for philosophical reasons. Then again, maybe it could be trauma. The hurt of losing Carmina was ebbing back to her.

Clover looked up toward the marble and remembered the woods. Carmina really could have made her way there. Certainly no bear would’ve taken—

Hm.

A hand flew involuntarily to her chin. She stood extremely still, struggling to process. With her head angled down, those who passed her suspected she was divining the meaning of a pattern of bloodstains.

Magic wasn’t an art of transformation. It was science and alchemy. The rest were fairy tales…

Hm.