4.55: The Waiting Game

Less than two minutes later, several professional-looking, pink-clothed safety personnel were gaining Kylie’s leave to enter Duniyasar and filing out onto the sands. Malas, not one to shirk his duties, got to diagnosing and treating our various minor injuries (he wasn’t happy at all with how much more sensitive I’d become to his magic, but that was hardly a high priority at the moment), and Alania was pacing back and forth across the hospital floor.

“This is my fault,” she said.

“Undoubtedly,” Malas said as he poured his blue magic into Kylie’s scrapes, “but self-flagellation is hardly useful right now. Concentrate on what you’re going to do with him once he gets back.”

“How is this Alania’s fault?” I asked. “She didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“I’m his surveyato,” she explained. “I should’ve seen this coming and prevented it.”

“You couldn’t possibly have known – ”

“That he’d get himself lost somewhere dangerous on an inadviseable academic exploration? Of course I could have, because he’s done it before. He seemed so much more casual about this historic rune research that I figured I could just let the phase pass and then redirect him back to the kind of research he came to me to do, but if he’s throwing himself down ancient wells for data then obviously I badly miscalculated!”

“What would you have even done about it?” I asked. “If you had known? I mean, warning him off didn’t exactly work last time – ”

“I should have found him a Politikala Refujeyo historian with a speciality in this sort of thing and and tricked him into an apprenticeship with them so that he could get his information in a safe and controlled manner!”

“You should’ve done that the first time,” Malas cut in.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Aksoy, are you a surveyanto for anyone? Do you have years of experience at managing students? Can you say that you have a near perfect track record before pointing to one of a few failure cases out of hundreds of students and saying I should have known better? There was no way to know the first time! Students look like they’re going to do stupid impulsive stuff and then settle down all the time! I wasn’t about to wreck the Nonus Acanthos’ entire future in laboratory research because he was throwing a few tantrums about school architecture!”

“Doesn’t that same argument apply here?” I asked. “You couldn’t have known – ”

“No, I know what he’s like, now. I should have been more vigilant. I should’ve stopped handling him with kid gloves just because I didn’t want to cut off the opportunities he has here, and handed him to someone firmer who could handle him.” She stopped walking and focused suddenly on Kylie. “Did you send him down there?”

“Me?! No! No, he promised me he wouldn’t do this!”

“Good. Perfect.” She resumed pacing. “We have him on trespassing on Duniyasar, then. It won’t be a strong claim, but it’ll be enough to prevent him or his family from putting up too much of a resistance to an apprenticeship to avoid penalty for the trespass. I’ll find him someone who can keep him safe, and we can move on.”

“You want to send him away?” I asked. “You can’t – ”

“I can, and I will if I have to. But there will probably be somebody on campus, so I wouldn’t worry too much. If Kylie – ”

“I won’t,” Kylie said. “I won’t… sue him, or whatever, to force him into an apprenticeship.”

“The only way to stop him from getting himself killed on these stupid jaunts is to give him to a specialist in his interests who makes them unnecessary. Surely the both of you understand that.”

“Well, yeah,” Kylie said, “if he wants to. But you can’t force him.”

“I probably won’t have to. If he’s enthusiastic for an apprenticeship, then that would be ideal. But if he’s going to keep this sort of thing up, and if I can’t stop him, then he needs to be in the hands of someone who can give him what he needs, even if he isn’t enthusiastic about it.”

It was hard to feel mad at Alania. She didn’t have all the information. From her point of view, a usually disciplined young scientist really was just throwing himself down wells in pursuit of random knowledge.

“I seem to recall having almost this exact conversation with Higgins about you, once upon a time,” Malas said, sounding amused.

“And he was right,” Alania said. “I fought Salusi tooth and nail, but we both know that without his hardline discipline there’s no way I would have survived to graduate. I would’ve started collecting spells until I burned out, because teenagers are all arrogant twits and teenaged scientists are a danger to absolutely everyone, especially themselves.”

I frowned. “I don’t think all teenage scientists – ”

“Yes, they are. Every single one of them. You live with one, you should know what I’m talking about.”

“She means magical teenage scientists,” Malas sighed. “And she’s right. They’re a plague upon this world, and we must have done something terrible to earn the job of keeping them alive long enough to be educated.”

“Max is pretty smart,” Kylie pointed out.

“Oh, they’re all smart,” Alania agreed. “That’s why they’re so fucking stupid.”

“The thing that you have to understand about the scientists that work here,” Malas explained, “is that they work here.”

“So…?”

“So, there’s a selection effect. Any mage scientist in this place is somebody who decided, at age fourteen, to risk their life in the Pit. That in itself leads to a population full of an absurdly reckless kind of person.”

“Hey,” I said, “you accepted an apprenticeship that got you a pair of spells that’ll kill you if you ever go outside. So if anyone’s reckless – ”

“On top of that, these are specifically people who are interested in researching dangerous and inconsistent phenomena. Many of them are obsessed with it; some of them specifically came here and went through the Initiation just to study it. They invite a dangerous chunk of the universe into themselves, a piece of something they’re interested in studying. They usually, if they can, become their own research subjects. The field is competitive, and taking risks is considered normal, and big breakthroughs based on big risks are prized. And they’re fourteen years old when they start. It’s very, very common for young magical scientists to think themselves invulnerable and dive headfirst into frankly stupid projects, drunk on stories of big risks and big discoveries, surrounded by a lot of resources and competition and pressures on their reputation, and not much oversight. Either luck and the vigilance of their surveyanti keep them alive long enough for them to grow some sense, or they die.”

“Or they survive through luck and turn into older scientists with no sense,” Alania pointed out. “A lot of my colleagues are still reckless idiots.”

“Did you ever noticed how few people were surprised by your familiarity link?” Malas asked.

“Plenty of people were surprised by it.”

“They were surprised that it succeeded. Nobody had any trouble believing that Max would attempt such a thing on his friends, did they?”

“… Hey, yeah. That is weird.”

“Doing something like that just for science is ruthless and over the top,” Alania said, “but not completely unbelievable. It’s the sort of thing an obsessive science prodigy under pressure might believably try, if pushed far enough.”

I thought about Clara, who we’d been initiates with, who’d risked killing Alania and sending Max or di Fiore to jail just so that she could be the youngest mage ever to undergo the Initiation. I thought about Max shattering the all bones in his arm in a science experiment, shrugging the injury off, and getting back to work as soon as he possibly could. Maybe Alania wanting the means to force Max into the control of someone who could keep him safer, just in case force was needed, wasn’t so unreasonable.

Well, it was, because we needed him to save the world and all that. But Alania didn’t know that.

While we were on the subject of protecting Max, though, there was something else that his surveyanto should definitely know about. “Um,” I said. “There’s another thing.” I glanced at Kylie and tapped my eye.

“Oh!” Kylie nodded. “Yeah, he picked up another spell down there.”

Alania and Malas both stared at us. “He what?” Alania gaped.

“A prophecy, we think. It’s in his eye. Like the actual eyeball. Very disconcerting to look at.”

“I think he said he earned it by finding some library?” I added. “Or… earned… the way to a library. Or something. There’s no library down there, but he kept thinking there was? It was really hard to follow anything he was saying, actually.”

“Whatever it’s helping him see,” Kylie said, “it seems to be confusing him. He kept getting… lost in time, I guess? Talking about us not being at the library yet, or water flowing that isn’t there, or about what things did do in the past or will do in the future… really hard to follow.”

Alania nodded thoughtfully. “Prophecies that can see through time are frequently confused by the concept of time,” she said. “We should be able to teach him to handle that. Or find somebody who can, anyway. There are plenty of expert prophets out there who should be able to help.”

“Just so long as it’s not another lost legacy of an established magical lineage who’ll need appeasing,” Malas chimed in.

“Oh, I’m sure not even we are unlucky enough to have that happen twice.”

The door outside swung open and a tall man caked in sweat and sand stood in the doorway, gasping. “Kuracar!”

Malas spun around. “Islor. Status?”

“We have him out. It’s a class five case.”

“Everyone out,” Malas snapped at us. “Time to get him in here?”

“They’re three minutes behind him. Resuscitation stable.”

“Resuscitation?” Kylie asked.

“Out!” Malas snapped. Alania shooed us both out of the room and followed, pulling the door firmly shut.

“Did he say resuscitation?” Kylie asked again.

“What’s a class five case?” I asked.

“Nothing that any of us can help with,” Alania said. “All that we can do at this point is not distract the kuracar while he’s working. The two of you should go back to your room and – ”

“That is absolutely not happening.”

Kylie and I sat on the floor of the tunnel to wait. Alania watched us, lips pursed, but didn’t say anything.

“I suppose you have work to get back to,” Kylie said.

“Yes,” she said. “A lot of it.” She sat down next to us.

We were there for nearly an hour, but nobody said anything. Nobody left. Eventually, the door opened. Malas looked down at us, face expressionless.

I leapt to my feet. “Well? Can we see him?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “He didn’t make it.”

“What do you mean he ‘didn’t make it’?”

“Maximillian Acanthos is deceased. His lungs were already full of water when he came in; we attempted to revive – ”

“Like hell!” I ducked around Malas and headed for the hospital bed surrounded by emergency personnel. The bedcurtains were open; they could see me coming, but didn’t attempt to stop me, merely moved aside so that I could see –

Max was motionless, and clammy, his hands and quite a few small patches on his face covered in blue magic. Several of those heart monitor sticker things were on his chest (his robes had been cut open to make room), hooked up to a machine that read no activity. He wasn’t breathing.

A breathing mask lay on the bedside table next to him; I grabbed it and pressed it to his face with one hand while checking his neck for a pulse with the other. “Why are you all standing around?!” I snapped at the rescue personnel. “Help me! Do something!”

They all just watched me sadly.

Someone was sobbing. Kylie. She must have come in with me. I felt the weight of her head on my shoulder, but I couldn’t pay her much mind; I was busy searching for a pulse that had to be there.

I don’t know how long it was before I finally put the mask down and stepped back. There were less people in the room with me when I did. A few of the rescue guys were still there. Kylie was there. Alania and Malas were there.

“I’ve notified the next of kin,” Malas said quietly. “Max’s family should arrive in two to three hours.”

His family. For… funeral things, or whatever, I supposed.

“Your magic’s still in him,” I said hopefully. “Would it do that if he was dead?”

“I’m afraid so. My magic is specialised to mimic living tissues, but it doesn’t need to adhere to a living person.”

“But…” I stared at him some more. “But this isn’t how it’s supposed to go.”

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.