4.80: Impressions

Learning to pick locks probably wasn’t worth my time, I decided, because I almost immediately thought of something better. Before my next shift, I went to the school store and poked around until I found something suitable for my needs – a little tub of quick-drying putty that would solidify after a few minutes’ contact with air. Then, I waited.

The next time Dae-hyun sent me for syringes, I took his key, let myself into the medicine room, and pulled the tub out of my pocket. Even soft, the putty had very little give, so I had to press the key in harder than I expected to make an impression of first one side, then the other. It was firm enough that the impressions came out clean. Perfect.

I put in a minimum number of hours that day, eager to finish my little craft project. I told Dae-hyun that the potion stocks for my side business were starting to get low and I needed to spend the afternoon making more. This was true, but along with some fresh potion ingredients, I’d also picked up some pewter.

My research hadn’t been very extensive, due to not having access to the actual internet, but the school intranet had some information on model casting as a hobby. Apparently it was a thing; people making molds and melting metal to make little soldier figures and soforth. Pewter was the second best metal to use; fairly cheap, and soft enough to work with. (The favourite metal was lead, but that wasn’t so easily available since everyone learned how poisonous it was.) I set up some potions to brew, then set up a clean crucible, lit the burner, and dribbled in little pellets of pewter.

I’d been so nervous. The instructions had made it look like such a hard thing to get right. But it was easy! I only burned myself three times casting the key, and one of those burns didn’t even blister!

One cooling phase and an application of healing potion later, and I had it. I had my copied key. I was so excited that I almost forgot to actually finish brewing the potions I was supposed to be brewing.

The next day I was working with Malas, and he wanted me to catalogue the supply of antibiotics. I took his key and, when he wasn’t looking, tested mykey in the lock to –

It didn’t fit.

I opened the door with Malas’ key and compared the two. At first I was worried it was a magic thing, like you needed a special magic key to get the door open, but a moment’s inspection revealed the truth: I’d just made a poor copy. I’d made the copy by pressing one side of the key into putty, then the other side, then using those two impressions to make a mold, but the problem with that method is that hurriedly pressing two sides of a key into some putty isn’t all that precise. I’d pushed too deep; the key was too thick. I could probably try to file some of the edge away?

I took a close look at Malas’ key. It looked mostly like a house key, with normal teeth, but also there were some strange indentations on either side. Just little holes drilled into the metal, a couple of millimetres deep, and not all the exact same depth. They hadn’t come out very well in my putty impression, and I had no idea if they were important. They might just be marks to identify the key or something… but I remembered the portal controls around Duniyasar, controlled by little flags. The flags themselves weren’t important, but notches in the sticks holding them told the system what portal to open. It was possible that the indents were part of some magical ID system and the lock wouldn’t work without them.

I needed to either be able to steal one of these keys, or come up with a better way to copy them.

I worked until lunch. Then, on my way back to the medical ward, I swung by my room and stuffed my digital camera in my bag. (I didn’t want to use the camera in my tablet for this. After I’d lost my tablet in the Labyrinth of Dreams, my new tablet had been able to access all my old files right up until we dropped out of intranet range heading for the Labyrinth, meaning that everything on the tablets must get automatically uploaded to some private part of the intranet. Probably, only my tablet could access those files. Probably. But I didn’t want this on the intranet, just in case.)

I returned to work. Malas gave his key a careful look before handing it over; he did this every time (probably checking that it was the right key), but this time it made my heart race, wondering if he could somehow see through my plans.

But no. He handed it over, and I shut myself in the medicine room to finish cataloguing antibiotics and take a lot of clear, careful photos of the key at the highest resolution I could. Maybe I could do… something with those. Probably. I wasn’t sure what. What was I supposed to do, whittle a key out of wood?

But hey, that made as much sense as the rest of my plan. Admittedly, even if I could get into the medicine storage without having to borrow a key, if I could sneak in there without people knowing… then what? If I had a way to trick the portal and get into the service tunnels (that might not even be there, but I couldn’t think of a better reason to have a portal to a wall, so it had to be service tunnels, right?), then I wouldn’t need the key. I already knew where another portal to the service tunnels was! Near the mess hall! I had some vague idea that, that the one in medicine storage was better, because I could get in without being seen by random students, but any method that took long enough for that to be an issue was a non-starter in the medicine storage anyway, because what if someone came in? What was I supposed to do, jam a piton into the wall where the portal was to break it, have a look around and just… fake confusion when the broken portal was discovered?

Every time we discovered something that seemed important, we just seemed to end up… fumbling around in the dark again. If someone would just give us some actionable steps to work with, that would be great.

Somebody opened the door; I glanced over to make sure my camera was stowed in my bag out of sight (it was) and turned my eyes back to my work.

“How’s it going?” Malas asked from the doorway.

“Fine. The numbers all check out so far, so nobody’s like, stealing antibiotics or anything. Is that a major concern?”

Malas shook his head. “But we have to keep track, just in case. How’s your health?”

“Fionnrath’s Destiny is behaving itself,” I sighed. End up with a handful of concerning symptoms a few times and have someone magically linked to you nearly die and the doctor acts like you’re gonna catch fire any minute. “Have you thought about getting a new locus?”

The question seemed to take Malas by surprise. “What?”

“Well, Kylie’s spell is only supposed to work properly in Fionnrath, right? But she can get it to work pretty well in Duniyasar. Not perfect, but well enough. Maybe one of the other Points of Power would help the kuracar work well enough for – ”

“Ah,” he said. “I see what this is about.”

My heart sped up. Had I said something, done something, to tip off the fact that we were going to destroy his locus, killing him and –

“This is about your familiarity bond, isn’t it?”

“Um… sure?”

Malas nodded. “Being attached so closely to Kylie’s making you stir crazy, huh? The two of you can go outside, you know.”

“We do,” I pointed out. “But… you can’t, right?”

“It’s fine. I own a sun lamp.”

“That’s not the same thing!”

“I’m old, Kayden. You get used to it after awhile.” Something must have shown in my expression, because he put his fingers to his temples and added, “I didn’t mean – I mean, I got used to it. I don’t have advice for your situation. I don’t feel trapped here; I just feel at home. But… look. I don’t have advice for your situation. But you’re not trapped here, except of course by your contracts; you and Kylie can go anywhere in the world once you graduate.”

“Together,” I said, trying not to sound too bitter. I lived with Kylie now, and it was totally fine. It was the idea of it being forced and unbreakable that bothered me. “And we’ll probably end up at Fionnrath, anyway. They’re not going to let her go easily, and once her contract here has expired…” Not that I expected the school to last that long. But hey, if we achieved our goal, and we somehow didn’t end up dead or in prison, same problem, right?

“Yes. Well.” He eyed me. I think. It’s hard to tell when you can’t see someone’s pupils. “That has been the case for quite some time, even if the amount of time you can spend apart has shortened.”

“Yeah, but…” but I’d kind of always figured, or at least daydreamed, about the link being broken someday. Now, that would mean Kylie’s death. It was no longer on the table, not even as an idle daydream.

I shook the malaise off. This wasn’t even what I was supposed to be thinking about. I was worried about Malas right now, the arsehole who’d manipulated and deceived me, who’d almost definitely wiped my memory against my will and lied to me about it, who I couldn’t trust. Who’d kept me and my friends alive and shown genuine concern for the lived and futures of everyone he treated. Who was part of this system that we had to destroy. Who’d faithfully served this school since before I’d been born, helping everyone he could, and had gone out of his way to protect me and take me on as an apprentice (I still wasn’t entirely sure why he thought I had enough promise to bother with, in that regard.)

That arsehole.

I picked up a bottle of antibiotics in front of me. “Where do these come from?” I asked.

“Uh, what?”

“I mean, you’ve never sent me to pick them up from the store or anything, so…”

“You’ve not been my apprentice long enough to see most of what we do,” Malas said. “But it’s the janitors who stock the shelves, actually.”

I couldn’t help but glance at the back wall. My assumption had been correct. They hadto come through that wall, right? There was no other reason for a portal to be there.

“And why is nobody ever here?” I asked.

“I don’t…”

“You’ve got tons of apprentices, right? At least, everyone says you do, and I’ve seen, like, five of them, maybe. But you’re almost always in here alone. Every time I ever came in with an injury, you were here, and that’s true most of the time now, too. And aside from Dae-hyun, I don’t see other apprentices around much. Do you even sleep, or…?”

Malas grinned. “I don’t require as much sleep as you. I try to spend as much of my waking time here as possible, because I’m the best equipped to deal with a life threatening emergency.”

“And the other apprentices?”

“They’re working.”

“Working on what?”

“You’ll find out in about two years.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Wow,” I joked. “Ominous. Makes me rethink this whole apprenticeship.”

“Too late, you already took the vow,” Malas grinned. He headed back for the door. “Have fun with paperwork.”

“It’s an absolutely riveting task,” I deadpanned. I didn’t relax fully until the door was closed once more.

Why had I decided that approaching the one guy who was definitely going to die in our plan had been the best way forward? I could’ve conned information out of random teachers, right? Alania probably knew as much as Malas; she was on the Council.

Well, I was here now. And I was going to find something out. I’d find out what Malas had erased from our minds, or why the janitors had left Max’s notes, or whether they’d erased our minds too and Malas had nothing to do with it. I’d find out something.

I just had to keep at it.