Plum

Neither Mary nor I said a word as Val led us through a maze of sterile stone hallways.

Now she wants to tell us everything. I wanted to strangle Val. Not when you found out, not after Isaac died, not even after we found all his lab work. Only when you get kidnapped are you willing to spill?

I wanted to hear her out, but that wouldn’t keep the bad taste forming in my mouth anyway.

“Here we are.” Val stopped at a sleek wooden door with the number six intricately carved on the frame. “Fairburrow won’t think to look for us in here.”

“Where the hell is here?” I muttered.

“Officially? We’re in a connector hall to the Church's headquarters.” Val fidgeted with the lock a bit and opened the door. “Nobody bothers to use these, though, and the cleaners shouldn’t be here for another week.”

“You sure know a lot.” I narrowed my eyes.

“You’ll see why. Come in.”

The room itself wasn’t particularly inviting. Several orange lanterns hung on the walls, with a simple brown leather couch against the far wall, and two felt chairs haphazardly placed in the middle.

Val casually tossed herself onto one of the chairs. “Come on, take a seat.”

“How many times have you been here before?” I gingerly sat down on the leather couch, with Mary taking the seat next to me. It wasn’t a particularly comfortable couch. “It’s clearly not your first visit.”

“How many cups of coffee have you drunk?”

“Like, ever?”

“Countless, I’m sure. Same answer.” Val leaned back, resting her legs on the free chair. “I spent five straight years down here with Fairburrow.”

“Five years…” I fixed my eyes on Val. “You better not hide anything this time.”

“I don’t plan to.” Val paused, carefully thinking about her words. “Have you ever been to an orphanage, Ruby, Mary?”

“Of course? I’m not as consistent as I should be, but I try to make it around twice a month at least.”

“That so sounds like you.” The corners of Val’s mouth slightly curled into a smile. “I never met my parents. From what nuns told me, they dropped me off at the orphanage's doorstep barely a week after I was born.”

Mary and I both stayed quiet. I could tell Val had been wanting to say all this for a pretty long time.

“It wasn’t too bad or anything, growing up in the orphanage. We had decent food, were treated well, and the nuns kept everything pretty orderly. The king made a visit once, though I was way too young to remember. Everything got messy once they decided to test our colors.”

“Your seventh birthday…” Mary said.

“Exactly.”

“Wait, I didn’t realize that was the same here.” It was tradition in Everbit; whenever someone turned seven, they officially got their magic tested. Apparently that was a worldwide thing.

“Church tradition,” Val shrugged. “Anyway. I still vividly remember the old priest passing around the crystal scanner—one of those fancy clear orb ones they bring out for special occasions. Half the other kids hadn’t figured out their color either, so I wasn’t particularly out of place at first.”

“What color did it scan for you…” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“Orange. I’m sure you know the basics—color matches your color, and the brighter the light, the stronger your color is. The second I touched the ball, it glowed like the sun in there. All the kids had to cover their eyes.”

“I thought you said your magic was white, not orange? Church certified and all that.”

“That's their official story anyway, but my color reassignment didn't happen for a while.” Val cleared her throat. “I never lived in the orphanage again. The Church took me to the capital that night, tossing me in a high security cell.”

“Because the seven-year-old who doesn’t know how to use magic is such a threat.”

“I know, right?” Val scoffed. “But they didn’t let me out for three days, just sliding in the occasional meal. All I could do was sit in the corner and cry. I didn’t even know what a Varie was, much less a Prisma, at that time! All little me knew was that she had used the cool color-changing ball incorrectly.”

“Where does this lead to Fairburrow?”

“Ruby! Give her time…” Mary scowled.

“No, no, fair question.” Val’s smile carried more regret than I’d ever seen from her. “From what I heard after the fact, the Church was at more of a loss than I was. Prismas they knew about. But a girl only having one incorrect color? Not a thing.”

“Until you.”

“Maybe, to this day, still not entirely sure. They planned on executing me apparently, until Fairburrow put a stop to it.”

“So that's how you know him.” I didn’t have anything even close to a full picture, but the pieces were slowly starting to come together.

“Pretty much. I’m still not sure if he viewed me as a case study, or did it out of goodwill. Doesn’t change the fact that I owe him my life.”

“So he’s the person you went and talked to.” I sighed. “I should’ve known.”

“Yeah. The whole time I lived down here with that man, he never let me take a peek behind the curtain. The fact that he was anything more than a priest came as a shock at the end of those long years.”

I tossed over a few responses in my head. That bitter taste had dissipated a bit, but that didn’t mean it had come close to completely disappearing. “So you never knew he hunted Prismas.”

“Not until Isaac.”

“So you figured it out before us…”

“I did. But I’ll get to that soon.” Val looked back down at the floor. “Those five years taught me more than the rest of my life combined. How to use my magic, how to fight, how to train. Hell, I learned how to make coffee from that man.”

“What got you out?” Mary jutted in. “He doesn’t seem like the type to just let you free.”

“He isn’t. But, one day—a bit after I’d started to master my dagger—he randomly called me in and asked me to do another scan, and this time I tested as a white magic user. After that, he decided to toss me in here.”

“Close enough to still watch…” I said. “Are you sure it was a normal tester?”

“Beats me, but I’m not going to complain.”

“And now Fairburrow’s out there, actively trying to kill us,” I said, voice quiet. “Why hide all this? You knew he murdered Isaac, and now we’re next on the chopping block.”

That was the one thing still eating at me. I could accept her not knowing. But when it got to the point that her staying quiet put Mary at risk, that’s when it went too far.

“I knew…” Her voice cracked. “I knew he did it. There’s not another orange magician who uses fire like that, but part of me couldn’t accept that Fairburrow would do such a thing. Then I got some common sense drilled into me.”

“By Gregory…”

“Professor Gregory, yeah. I’m assuming you can guess what our conversation was about.”

“Makes sense I guess…” It was hard to swallow, but one look from Val made it obvious that whatever they talked about, she wasn’t telling. “But it doesn’t change the fact that Fairburrow’s still out there, and we gotta hunt him down!”

“We… Are you sure?”

“Absolutely!” I reached out a hand toward Val.

It wasn’t that my resentment had suddenly disappeared, but raging at Val would do nothing but split us apart. We were both targets of Fairburrow now, and targets had to stick together.

Val hesitated, then grasped my hand with the strength of someone twice her size. “Part of me still hopes there's something we're missing. But, well, Gregory knocked that possibility away… Let’s do it!”

“Then what are we waiting for?” I stood. Every moment we wasted down here gave Fairburrow another second to scheme. “Let’s go finish this.”

“I don’t think that's a good idea…” Mary gently tugged on my sleeve. “He knows you, Ruby. Getting impatient and rushing him just leads us into another trap.”

“But—”

“She’s right,” Val scowled. “Sitting tight and making a plan is the last thing Fairburrow would expect.”

“Gods…” The me before coming here would have ignored them and left on the spot. And part of me was begging to slam the door on them and go tackle Fairburrow, but that wouldn’t let Isaac’s memory rest easily. “Let’s go back to Gregory. I wanted to talk to him about what to do with Isaac’s research before this anyway.”

“I was about to suggest the same thing,” Val said, gingerly rising from her chair. “Let’s go. If we walk fast, we should get there with a few minutes to spare.”