4.107: Mind Games

I woke up feeling a lot better. Not great, but a lot better.

There was still something… itching… in the back of my head. Not quite a headache, although it did carry the unpleasantly disorienting tingle that signified magic in my body that wasn’t Kylie’s. But it was more than that. It felt… invasive? It reminded me of the spellthing in my Initiation, handing me a cup of tea and waiting for me to take it into my body and trap myself. I pushed the feeling away, and opened my eyes.

I was in a bed in the hospital ward in Skolala Refujeyo. It was the bed nearest the door. I knew this even though the soundproofed curtains around me blocked everything out, because I’d changed sheets and mopped floors under those beds too damned often not to notice that one wobbly screw on the right guard rail on the bed. The guard rail that my right hand was cuffed to, which… okay. That was probably reasonable.

I didn’t seem to be otherwise restrained. There was a pulse-ox monitor on my left index finger, and I knew at a glance at the screen that my heart rate and blood oxygen were normal. I didn’t have any IV lines in me, and I was still in my prison robes, so whatever had happened clearly hadn’t required any serious intervention. And I mustn’t have been unconscious for very long; Malas wouldn’t leave an unconscious patient for more than a couple of hours without putting an IV line in, just in case. Even if it was a patient he wished was dead. He… he probably wished I was dead. I had been planning to destroy his locus. I wondered what that was like for him, the moment where he realised why I kept coming back to asking about his ability to live outside it. Past betrayals and memory wipes and soforth aside, the fact that he hadn’t ‘accidentally’ killed me as soon as I’d arrived spoke volumes about his commitment to his healthcare principles.

Little patches of his blue magic tingled all over my skin. Most were little marks and scratches that I’d already had, but there were a few new cuts, too. It looked like I’d fallen on my right arm and scratched it up pretty badly.

Okay, well. At least this was a change of scenery. Wasn’t exactly happy about being helplessly handcuffed to a bed behind a soundproofed curtain when someone had apparently just tried to poison me, seemed like an easy location for a second attempt, but whatever.

I pushed back that itchy feeling in my mind again and looked around. There was a glass of water on the bedside table. Haha, no. I wasn’t eating or drinking anything unless I was under direct medical supervision, no matter how unpleasantly dry my throat felt. But behind it…

Behind it was a picture in a picture frame. Three kids, about ten or eleven years old, bodies all stretched out and gangling from growth spurts they hadn’t filled out from yet. Me in the middle, an arm looped around the shoulders of a girl on each side. Melissa in my left, bending her knees a little (she’d always been the tallest), arms crossed shyly over her chest. Chelsea on my right, sticking her tongue out, making rabbit ears behind my head.

The bolt of loneliness and longing that pierced my heart was so intense that for a moment I thought it was a medical symptom. I rubbed at my eyes and picked up the picture like it was a precious thing, bringing it closer.

It wasn’t until I’d actually picked it up that I realised the frame. Wooden, bulky, painted a gaudy yellow. Repaired with tape where it had once broken in half.

This was my picture frame. From my bedroom, in the school.

Several questions arose. First: what was it doing here? I hadn’t been allowed to keep any of my own stuff in prison; why had they brought me this? Had someone snuck it in? Why?

Second: that picture had not been in this frame. I’d looked at this picture frame a great many times over the past couple of years, and I knew with certainty that it had contained a picture of my parents. This picture, I was pretty sure I’d never seen before. (That wasn’t unusual; Melissa’s, Chelsea’s, and my parents all had a lot of pictures of us, and we didn’t exactly look through photo albums together to reminisce.) Wherever this one had come from, it was well loved; it was a paper print out of a digital photo, not a proper photo, and the edges of the paper were furred with use. Bright blue pen ink had leaked onto it at some point, leaving a smear across the bare arm thrown over Chelsea’s shoulder.

This photo was well loved, but not by me. It wasn’t mine. It definitely didn’t belong in this photo frame.

What was going on?

I ran a thumb over the peeling tape where the photo frame had been repaired. It was a very bulky frame. I’d broken it, and found Chelsea’s tracker inside. Maybe there was something…?

I took the photo out and searched the frame. Nothing. That didn’t surprise me; it had probably been searched before the guards let it anywhere near me.

Okay, no secret keys or anything. They’d changed the photo; it had to be something to do with the photo. There was a date written on the back of it, but it looked like it was just the date it was taken; no message there. If something significant had happened on that date, I didn’t know what it was.

Maybe I was overthinking this. Maybe Chelsea and Melissa had written letters to me and learned that they weren’t getting through (probably when I didn’t reply), and they’d asked someone to arrange a way to let me know that they were thinking of me. That person didn’t think they could sneak a letter in, but this photo that they could pretend was from my room might be obscure enough. Maybe it was that simple.

Maybe it wasn’t. And what else was I going to do to pass the time, but overthink things?

That prickling sense of intrusion in the back of my mind was distracting. I pushed it away again. I should probably be worried about it, clearly foreign magic in my brain, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I wasn’t sure how, but… somehow, I knew it couldn’t do anything to me unless I let it in. Somehow, I knew that if I kept it out, it was harmless.

Whoever had tried to poison me had done so magically. Maybe this was a lingering effect of whatever they’d tried to do. Maybe this was the intended effect. I’d bring it up with Malas when I saw him. Or whoever he sent to check on me, if he was too disgusted to see me himself; I wouldn’t blame him.

I hoped he’d send an apprentice I didn’t know. This would be extremely awkward if he sent Dae-hyun or something.

In the meantime, I looked at the picture. At us three, staring out of the frame, all smiling or grinning. At Chelsea’s stupid haircut, which she’d cut herself when her parents weren’t looking. At my long, skinny arms, free of scars. No familiarity rune, no spellthing teeth marks, although you couldn’t really tell under the blue ink smudged across my right arm.

That was really bright blue ink, actually. Not normal pen ink. Maybe it was from a highlighter or something? And it was… I mean, it looked like an accidental smudge, but it was very clearly localised on my arm.

A bright, pale blue. The exact colour of Malas’ magic.

I put the picture down and looked at my own right arm. The one I’d scratched up when I’d fallen on the stone floor. At least, I’d assumed I had; there was no other reason to be missing skin there. The wound looked pretty extensive, though. Not deep, probably, but the magic covered a lot of skin, in a weirdly jagged, uneven patch.

Um, okay. This meant what, exactly?

Oh man, I hoped there was nothing hidden underneath the magic. I was absolutely not going to go digging something out from underneath my skin, magical replacement skin or otherwise. I had no idea how that would even work; surely anything anyone wanted to smuggle to me would be better off smuggled in via another method, and if anything was under the skin then that mean that Malas was in on it which would make no sense whatsoever, and even if he was why not hide it under the pillow or something… I felt my arm frantically, and found nothing. Thank god.

I glanced at the picture again. Me, Melissa, Chelsea. Looked at the jagged magic on my arm. And suddenly, all at once, I saw it. I saw what they were trying to tell me.

Awhile ago, back when we were much younger, Chelsea, Melissa and I learned about the existence of Morse code. We’d thought it was so cool, a secret alphabet that we could use to send secret messages to each other that the grown-up wouldn’t be able to read. Then we’d seen the twenty six letters and, being barely literate children, immediately given up. But it hadn’t stopped us from developing our own little dot-dash code of about fifteen different messages. Pretend to disagree with me. Play along. Cause a distraction. When Melissa had sent me Cheryl’s key, she’d included the dot-dash code for ‘trojan’ in her signature.

The scratches on my arm, clearly highlighted in Malas’ magic, were the code for ‘I’m here, let me in’.

The magical itch pressed insistently in my mind.

This was… this was a stupid idea. But, somebody had snuck something magic into my apple juice. Somebody had managed to cut this message into my arm, so that Malas’ magic would highlight it. Somebody had gotten that photo in here. It was reasonable to assume that all of these people were the same person, or at least working together. Somebody involved knew our code, and the only three people in the world who knew our code were me, Chelsea, and Melissa.

The magical itch pressed insistently in my mind.

I let it in.

It was a good thing that I was lying in bed, because a new kind of disorientation overwhelmed me. I suddenly had a sort of double vision; two separate images superimposed over each other, turning both the hospital room and whatever the hell else I was looking at into a confusing mess of shapes. With some experimentation, I figured out how to focus on one; how to push the foreign image away to see just the hospital room again.

How to push the hospital room away to see the new image.

It was a hand. Long, delicate fingers, yellow painted nails, mage mark just below the wrist; I recognised it immediately as Saina’s. Resting on a plain stone floor.

No; not resting. Lying on a plain stone floor. The hand had been severed halfway up the forearm, blood streaked across the stone, and Saina was nowhere in sight.

I screamed.