4.81: Catching Up

“Are you ready?” Kylie called to me through my bedcurtains.

“I can’t find my sash,” I replied.

“Your what?”

“My sash. For my robes. I swear I had it when I did laundry.”

“There’s your problem; you’re still doing your own laundry. Clearly you lost it. You know the janitors will do it for you, right?”

“I have not started trusting them more with my stuff, given recent events.”

I couldn’t see Kylie as I dug through my clothes, but I could practically feel her eyeroll through the bedcurtains. “Well, they wouldn’t steal your sash, so so far I’d say that that decision has been a net loss for you. Don’t you have others? You have other uniforms, right?”

“Yeah, but now I’m down a sash. Five sashes for six uniforms is just wrong, somehow.”

“Oh my god! We’re going to be so late, Kayden!”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming,” I grumbled. I pulled the sash off another clean uniform and put it on. This felt wrong. Not physically; the sashes were all identical. But I had standards, and now I had the wrong number of sashes.

The event that Kylie was so worried about being late for was Talbot’s birthday party. I really needed to stop making friends; they carried with them the burden of endless birthday parties. This had been so much more manageable with Magista around to remind us about them. And… and Max.

But now it was up to us. So. I took my gift out of the top drawer of my bedstand. Pulling the drawer open made something slide to the front; the tiny, uneven pewter key I’d made that had completely failed to open the door to medicine storage. That had been about a month ago, and despite lots of fiddly sculpting, casting and filing, I hadn’t managed to get a copy accurate enough to open the damn door.

It’d be just my luck if it was sealed with magic as well as the key. Then, even a perfect copy would be a waste of time.

Talbot’s party was held outside, in a clearing in a forest that I had vague memories of going on a date with Magistus in once. Talbot himself was more excited than usual – he was trying to play it cool like always, but the agitated, irregular tumbling of his externalised spell gave him away.

It wasn’t much. It seemed that I’d been right about complicated, extravagant parties being a legacy mage thing – or possibly just being a Magista thing. We were having a picnic, mostly involving food filched from the mess hall. The most decorative thing, aside from brightly coloured presents, was the picnic blanket.

“I can’t believe we’re the last ones here,” Kylie grumbled as we entered the clearing. The party was small, just the six members of the coven, which struck me as weird because I knew Talbot had other friends. We weren’t exactly part of the same social group, but I’d gotten the sense that he’d been at least moderately popular when we’d met. Maybe he was doing the ‘multiple parties’ thing.

He turned at the sound of Kylie’s voice and grinned. “You came!” he said in mock surprise.

“And count yourself lucky,” she said with mock sternness, rushing over to give him a hug. I glanced over the other people. Hua leaned against a tree at the edge of the clearing, her usual serious expression cut with a small smirk.

Alan, still looking a little lost without Helen or Jamil, stood awkwardly clutching a brightly wrapped box a little too tightly. Cheryl shot him a reassuring smile. She had a package under one arm and a small stone in her hand, which she was idly kneading like play dough.

“You never bring Holly,” I noted. “How is she?”

“Totally fine. Getting great at learning her letters. But there’s no way I’m bringing her to this zoo. She’s with her uncle.”

“Aww. I haven’t seen her in ages.”

Cheryl rolled her eyes. “I’ll bring pictures next time.”

After some of the usual banter, we got to giving gifts. I’d had made one of those desk nameplates that corporate managers and stuff always had in movies. Talbot ran his fingers over the braille reading TALBOT ERICSON – SENIOR EXECUTIVE SHITSTIRRER and laughed. Then finger-traced the letters above to make sure they said the same thing.

Which was a little offensive, really, that lack of trust. I mean, sure, I’d seriously considered having the Roman letters read TALBOT ERICSON – REDSTRING CONSPIRACY NUTCASE and not telling him about it, but I hadn’t actually done it. Nobody trusted each other these days.

Alan, who still didn’t know Talbot particularly well, nervously handed over his box, which turned out to include a selection of candles scented like different kinds of food. Talbot inhaled each one deeply and rated them on how hungry they were going to make his roommates (nothing got less than an eight), which sparked a twenty minute round table debate on whether bacon was more or less appetising than vanilla pudding.

Kylie’s gift of a lightweight scarf looked fairly normal to me, but Talbot literally cackled in delight. As he put it on, I saw why – the ends moved… oddly. The scarf was thin and light, but the ends weighted somehow, in a fashion that helped it dance and whip dramatically in the wind along with his hair and coat.

“You made him worse,” Hua groaned, rubbing her temples.

“Sounds like someone’s jealous,” Talbot grinned.

“Oh, shut up and take your hat,” she grumbled, handing him some kind of fashionable beret thing that even I could tell was probably from some expensive designer.

Talbot put the hat on and frowned. “Hua. Be honest with me. Did you buy this for me so you could borrow it all the time like my glasses?”

“It matches your glasses. You look stylish.”

“See, that doesn’t answer my question at all. In fact, it supports my theory quite substantially.”

“Look, you’re the one who wears expensive sunglasses everywhere even though you don’t need them. Borrowing them is logical efficiency!”

“Yeah, well, only Kylie gets to borrow them now. She has dibs.” Talbot took his glasses off and handed them to Kylie, who put them on, grinning. Hua put a hand over her heart and gasped.

“Cur! Do our years of tradition mean nothing to you?”

“Tradition is the tool of the aristocracy used to control the culture of the little guy for their benefit.”

“She has a point, though,” Kylie said, trying to adjust the glasses to fit comfortably on her nose. “You’re the one who keeps wearing them around her.”

“I have to! If I stop wearing them, Vance will win!”

“Who’s Vance?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know,” Hua told me.

“Vance is a no-good cur who thinks he can show me up, but he can’t! I will be victorious!”

“Vance sings karaoke better than Talbot and also has the temerity to wear shoes,” Hua explained.

“Um.” I frowned. “Okay?”

“A few years ago,” Talbot said, “for Christmas, I decided to buy Vance some really nice running shoes. The best shoes I could find. Very expensive, very good brand. It was fantastic.”

“Vance is paraplegic,” Hua explained.

“So I did. We had a little get together, I gave him the gift, and then… do you know what this bastard did to me? Can you guess? Just guess!”

“He bought you these glasses?” Kylie guessed.

“Yes! Expensive, top of the line, the best sunglasses he could find in the entire world! And he thanked me for the running shoes, acted really enthusiastic about ti! And he has the temerity to wear those shoes I bought him every. Single. Day. I can’t stop wearing these until he does. Or he’ll win. But I’m going to win, see, because he’s going to outgrow those shoes eventually, and when he does, I’ll still be wearing these glasses.”

“He’s seventeen,” Hua pointed out. “I think his feet have stopped growing.”

“Sure, with that attitude!”

“Or, in fact, any attitude.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I broke in, “but I think whatever you’ve got going on is somehow weirder than my legacy mage friends.”

“Sure, be mean to a guy on his birthday!”

“On that note,” Cheryl cut in, “are you going to open this present already? It’s heavy.”

She handed her package to Talbot, who nearly dropped it, surprised by the weight. When he unwrapped it, it became clear why – the contents were stone. Two candle holders, each almost as thick and long as my forearm, carves in intricate, detailed floral designs. Tiny stone flowers and leaves of all kinds of shapes layered over each other, completely covering the candlesticks.

Talbot looked awestruck. “You molded these by hand, didn’t you? With your magic?”

She shrugged. Just getting some practice in.

“They’re amazing!”

I eyed the detailed work. Glanced at the stone that Cheryl was still kneading in one hand. And had an idea.

As soon as I had the chance, I took her aside. “Hey,” I said, “how detailed can you mold stone?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Pretty detailed?”

“Do you think you could replicate a key?”

And so that’s how I ended up rushing back to my room for my key reference materials, too lost in thought to really notice where I was going, and almost physically ran into Peter.

“Hey, Kayden! There you are! Have you heard the news?”

“You’re going to have to be a lot more specific,” I said, not slowing down.

Peter matched my pace. “I mean about how they’re opening the Pit for competitions again.”

That stopped me in my tracks. “They’re what?”

“Yeah. They found the assassin, fixed the problem, and they’re upping security. So they’re starting – ”

“Assassin? That can’t be right! There couldn’t have been an assassin! It was just a system breaking, right?”

“How do you know?”

I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Frowned to myself.

We’d assumed that the problem with the Pit had been a random, one-off glitch like the others we’d noticed, because we didn’t have any better explanation. If it had been proper damage somehow, then the techs would’ve found it fairly quickly, and an assassin…

“It can’t be an assassin,” I repeated. “That kind of assassination attempt against Saina was too sloppy, too chancy, too stupid. Nobody smart enough to pull that off would think it was worth trying.”

“Saboteur, then,” Peter shrugged. “I don’t know why they messed with the system. All I was told is that they know who it was and they can stop it happening again. Anyway – ”

“If this is about reforming the pit comp team, no,” I said. “You’ll have to find someone else.”

“Oh god, no! Are you insane? Saina could have died! Any of us could have died! What if some other nutcase decides to break something? I’m never getting in that Pit again! No, I just thought you should know.”

“Right. Great. Thanks for telling me.” That was… good news, probably? I was still pretty sure that no individual team member could’ve been the target if it was sabotage (too chancey), meaning it was probably some poor bastard with a grudge against the school itself, and not my problem. With that resolved, at least something in this school was going back to normal. I rushed back to my room to grab my photos and key molds for Cheryl.

That damned missing sash was under my bed.