4.18: A Meeting of Worlds

“So your family are coming here?” Kylie asked, looking up from her tablet but not bothering to sit up on her bed. “To Refujeyo?”

“Next weekend, yes.”

“Is that even allowed?”

“It must be,” I said. “Fiore used to come by to check on di Fiore, remember? And Max’s, uh… uncle?… came by last semester. So why can’t my parents visit?”

“Is that what you told the staff, to get them to arrange it?” Max asked, trying not to grin. He was also reading on his tablet, but sitting up straight in a desk chair he’d positioned to allow easy conversation, instead of lounging on his bed like a normal person. Because of course he was. “How hard did you have to lean on them?”

“Oh, I didn’t have to lean on anyone. I suggested it to Fiore and he arranged the whole thing.” I lay back against my pillows, put my own tablet down and stared at the ceiling. “Frankly I wish it’d been harder. I’m not looking forward to this.”

“Then why – ?”

“It’s a solution to an annoying problem. My parents are suing the school and trying to make them void my contract and send me home, and if we can’t convince them to drop it and have to actually say ‘no’ to them then they’re probably going to raise another media shitstorm.”

Max and Kylie both sat forward.

“And you didn’t think to mention this?” Kylie asked.

“I’m… mentioning it now? Calm down, they’re not going to win. I can’tgo anywhere.” I tapped the familiarity mark on my arm. “I’m just hoping we can get them to back down before I have to explain to them why I can’t go anywhere, because them knowing about that is not going to help the situation.”

“They don’t know?” Kylie asked at the same time as Max asked, “Why didn’t you say anything earlier?”

“It… never came up?” I knew why I hadn’t said anything earlier. There was so much other stuff going on, and there was nothing my friends could’ve done to help anyway, and… well, there was a chance that they were going to keep digging into why my parents were suddenly against Skolala Refujeyo, and I really, really didn’t want to have to dance around the inciting incident. I didn’t want to have to actually conceal from them, lie to them, about taking hormones. That… felt too much like treating the whole thing like a shameful secret. And I wasn’t allowed to be ashamed of my body. I’d made that decision a long time ago.

They might already know, of course, and somehow that made the whole thing worse instead of better. Sharing a room with two people when I had to keep a shirt on and hide away my pads and never explain when I was off to get my T shots (I let my specialist do those, there was no reason to have to keep hormones in my room) was a little stressful in a background kind of way, but if they knew I was doing it, if it was actually all pointless, if I was concealing stuff and failing, that was mortifying. I just wanted to know if they knew or not. I’d prefer it if they didn’t know. But if they did know, and they were fine with it, I wanted to know that.

I supposed that either way, I was looking at the two best case scenarios, wasn’t I? Either they didn’t know, which was great. Or they did, and it didn’t bother them at all, wasn’t worth mentioning. Which was also great. It shouldn’t matter to me, right? Logically. It wasn’t affecting anything.

It still mattered to me.

And of course, there was the possibility they didn’t know and they were transphobic, and it was just hanging out on the internet waiting for an idle google, a time bomb set to go off when I least expected it…

“Okay,” Max said, “so you’re telling us now because we need to make sure your parents think this school is the best place for you, yes? And not a place where you have nearly died multiple times and might die again saving the world.”

“Exactly. Also somewhere I’m getting a world class education.”

“So we have to lie,” Kylie said, “a lot. Just a, a massive amount of lying.”

“They’ll only be here a handful of hours,” I said. “We shouldn’t have time for our lies to catch up with us.”

“Hmm.” Max stood up, rather abruptly. “I have a tangentially related question, but it might be a sensitive topic.”

“Please,” I said, “ask your sensitive tangentially related question.”

“Do your parents know the name of the cursebinder who cut your chest?”

Oh. That sensitive topic. I sat up. “Why?”

“Just… interested.”

“Why?”

“Never mind. It’s not actually important; forget I said anything.”

“Max, why are you interested in the cursebinder who cut my chest?”

He started searching through some papers on his desk. “It was just something interesting that I was looking into, before your success with Lorelei’s Broth of Dreams. Fionnrath’s Destiny spoke to you of scars, and we know now that it was probably referring to the bite on your arm to remind you of the memories we had lost, but at the time it seemed equally likely that it could be talking about your chest, especially since we thought that the Child of the prophecy resided there.” He snatched a few sheets from the pile of papers and headed over to my bed. “I noticed something… curious about a different project that I’ve been working on.” He handed me a piece of paper.

I peered at it. It was one of his diagrams in the ancient runic language we’d found on the skeleton in the Labyrinth, and in the tapestries of Duniyasar. It looked like they all looked; lines connected by small angular runes, like a circuit diagram or really complex flowchart. The unusual thing about this one was that it wasn’t laid out in a sort of grid pattern, with lots of parallel lines, but was instead radiating out from a single point, like cracks in a piece of glass that had been shot, or a spiderweb. A spiderweb with a couple of hundred threads, marked with runes where they intersected.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“An attempt at a power diffusion runic circle. Remember when we accidentally channelled all of the destiny’s power out of your arm and broke the floor?”

“Yes.”

“Well, channelling it into this is supposed to bleed off the power without breaking the floor. It doesn’t… quite work how I wanted it to. It tends to reflect power back, rather than absorbing it.”

“Is this how you broke your arm bones into tiny little chips?”

“Ah. Yes. But, I’ll have you know, the calculations are almost perfect for that purpose. If I had’ve been trying to create a rune that could reliably use my own magic to break my arm bones into tiny little chips and take no damage to the rune itself, I couldn’t possibly have done a better job than this. It is very, very well calculated.”

“Congratulations on your arm mutilation rune. What’s this got to do with anything?”

“Just… keep that in mind. Its distribution is very nearly perfect for containment and reflection of raw magic.” He handed me another piece of paper.

It was the sketch that Malas had done, of the ‘scars’ on my chest. At one glance, I knew what Max was getting at.

I put Malas’ diagram over Max’s. The lines matched up almost exactly. Some of them were off by a few millimetres, and Max’s diagram had more lines in it, and the lines in Malas’ diagram met with each other in vague blobs rather than tiny defined runes due to the limited resolution of his scan, but the similarity was far, far too close to be a coincidence.

“So,” I said, voice scratchy in a suddenly dry throat, “this means…?”

“Probably nothing,” Max said. “It might be a coincidence.”

“When they’re that similar? No way.”

“It might just be that there mathematics of power distribution are the same in the system used on you, and in these runes. It doesn’t mean for certain that your cursebinder used these runes. But it’s… pretty likely. And… I remade mine, using the kuracar’s sketch as a direct template. I got better results. This might actually represent a perfect runic circle for containing and reflecting raw power, if you compensate for some minor distortion due to skin growth. Given that your spell hasn’t woken up no matter what you put it through, there’s a pretty high chance that it is extremely well bound.”

“You think the cursebinder who cut me is some kind of expert in the runic language you’re using.”

“It looks like a possibility, yes. I want to reiterate that this probably isn’t important in any way. I’m not asking you to track down the person who did this to you, or anything. But if it’s information that you do happen to have on hand at any point… I would very much like to speak with this person. I think that mastering these runes is my best chance of breaking the world, as Fionnrath’s Destiny put it, and stopping the Child from being born.”

“I heard the recording of it telling you that,” Kylie piped up. “Didn’t it also say that you’d have to break yourself three times first? And you’re already done your mind, which was losing your memory…”

“Yes. Don’t worry about that. I think I’ve already figured out what it meant, and it’s not nearly as ominous as it sounds. I’ll explain when I’m sure,” he added, before we could ask. “I have a little more research to do, first.”

I nodded. Max said it wasn’t important, but he always said stuff like that. I made a mental note.

If possible, I had to get that name from my parents.