He strode over and reached through the ivy, seizing one of the bars with both hands. It was strong, immovable, and freezing cold. Thinking to climb up it, he steadied his grip, but the cold intensified, shooting down his arms, sinking into his bones. He grunted and let go, leaping backwards and rubbing his arms vigorously. The cold lingered, and he shuddered.
“Let me try,” said Natalie, stepping forward through the ivy.
“No, don’t!” said Alex quickly. “It’s so cold it hurts.”
“I will just try,” she insisted, brushing past him.
After testing both gates’ strength for herself, not even flinching from the cold, Natalie stepped back again, closing her eyes in concentration. Just as it had in class, her golden aura came to life, flicking lightly all over her skin. She frowned and extended her arms, pushing the magic away from her, toward the gates. It didn’t quite reach, seeming to sputter and rain down upon the ivy, where it disappeared.
She tried again, this time with her hand directly on the metal. Her hand looked wreathed in golden flame, but the flame died quickly, dropping down to the ivy once more. It was the same on the third try, and on the fourth she could not muster an aura of the same strength.
“I don’t see how we’re going to do this,” Alex murmured. Aamir’s words rang in his ears, and he racked his brain for a solution. Maybe he could construct something they could climb, or something that would propel them…The ladder in the cellar was much too short, but maybe he could use it somehow. Building something would probably attract a lot of attention, though. How could he go about it in secret? And what kind of defensive spells might be at the top?
But then he looked to Natalie, and he forgot his plans and the freezing cold permeating his body.
Natalie had slumped dejectedly to the ground and buried her face in her hands. Alex sat beside her, putting an arm gently around her shoulders. She leaned slightly into him, crying softly and pulling her knees up.
“Hey,” he said gently after a minute. “Don’t lose hope. We’re going to find a way out of this mess. I promise.” He wasn’t sure how he’d fulfill that promise, but he could never give in.
She stopped crying after a moment, gathering herself quickly and wiping at her eyes. “My family must be so worried about me,” she said with a quiet sniff, sitting up a little. “My sister Elena…she is just starting middle school. We were going to talk every day.”
Alex thought again of his mother and felt pain in his chest.
“You’ll get back to them,” he said firmly, as much to reassure himself as to comfort her. He managed to smile. “I’ve got no choice in the matter—I promised your little sister I’d look after you.”
She sighed. “Yes, you did.”
A few more moments of silence passed between them, and then she tensed and set her jaw, looking again at the gates. “I have a plan,” she announced, rising to her feet. “We will stay here, just until I get strong enough. I’ll practice all the time. And then we’ll come back here, and I’ll use magic to blow the gates away, and we’ll tell all the students and get everyone out.” She looked at him, her eyes glinting. “You can help me practice, and learn the way out here.”
He didn’t say anything for a minute, trying to think of another approach. It couldn’t be that simple. Countless students must have tried that. If Natalie were the one leading the escape, she would be the one facing punishment, or possibly worse.
“It is a good plan,” she said a little defensively, watching for his response.
“Yes, it is,” he replied, not wanting to deflate her. “Let’s start practicing right away.” There was no harm in her strengthening her magic.
And in the meantime, he had to come up with something else.
Chapter 17
But, a week later, Alex had not thought of a better plan any more than he had mastered even the simplest of magical exercises. He had at least become more familiar with the hallways, but was feeling increasingly trapped, and growing increasingly closer to despair. When Alex had first arrived, Aamir had said he had a few weeks before he would seriously be expected to start performing magic, but the days were slipping by at a worrying speed.
Natalie, for one, was progressing beautifully, and believed that in just a little more time she would be ready to try the gates again. He felt he had no choice but to continue pursuing their current plan, as worried as it made him. After managing several more solo trips to the gates, he was convinced they were impenetrable. He couldn’t even touch them for more than twelve seconds, and he couldn’t imagine they were unguarded by more dangerous magical means.
At Natalie’s suggestion, Alex had started making a sincere effort to befriend Jari and Aamir. She pointed out that they probably knew lots of things he didn’t, and even suggested they might want to help.
“Don’t you think everyone here must want to escape as much as we do?” she had asked earnestly.
“They might be too afraid,” he had countered, thinking of Aamir. “They might decide to rat us out to ensure their own safety.”
“Just be careful, then,” she had insisted.
Now, he found himself following Jari and Aamir into the mechanics’ lab. The two of them were working on a project, the scope of which was mysterious but intriguing to Alex. He sat on a stool beside their workbench, watching the two boys bickering as they stared down at a minute piece of machinery through magnifying glasses strapped to their heads, each holding a delicate pair of instruments in their hands. The room was full of little clicks and whirrs, the sounds of clockwork all around him.
Indeed, the walls of the large, yet crowded room were hung with clocks of every shape and size. What was more, they all seemed intent on telling a different kind of time. One ran between “start” and “finish,” and seemed to be stuck on the latter. Another had been carefully calibrated to chime five minutes before class would begin. And another, rather ominously, appeared to be counting down, with only a few hundred hours left before it was out of time.
“So,” Alex said, interjecting himself into his roommates’ argument, “if technology doesn’t work here, how does all this function?” Alex had been carrying his cell phone when he left Middledale High to follow Natalie, but it must have slipped from his pocket during his struggle with her on Spellshadow Lane because he no longer had it. Natalie hadn’t been carrying a cell phone at all and neither wore watches, so he hadn’t been able to test the no-technology theory the boys had informed him about a few days ago.
Jari swiveled, and Aamir took the opportunity to begin poking and prodding at the piece of machinery that lay on the table.
“We mostly use clockwork,” the blond boy said, his expression sage-like. “Electrical engineering just doesn’t work, but we can use a little magic and good old-fashioned physics to keep basic things like this going. Not to mention, once you mix magic and clockwork, there’s really all manner of things you can do.”
Alex watched as Aamir reached down, a little bloom of golden fire slipping from his fingertips and into their machine, which shuddered, then lay still.
“Told you it wouldn’t work,” Jari said without looking.
Aamir let out a grunt of irritation.
Alex looked down at the gears. They fit together so elegantly, so precisely, that he found himself drawn to them. Here was something he could grasp easily.
“What does this do?” he asked, looking down at the project.
“Well,” Jari said, “it’s supposed to get up and walk around a little, only Aamir here doesn’t know how to make a proper set of hydraulics.”
“Oh, and you do?” Aamir retorted.
Jari leaned down, looking the device over.
“Pull your magic out,” he said.
Aamir sighed, then reached out, retrieving the little bloom of golden fire.
Alex watched with interest. “Couldn’t you have done that?” he asked Jari.
Jari grimaced. “It’s damnably hard to get someone else’s magic to do what you want?
??all the books on how to do it have been hidden away. And dispelling it altogether is…well, impossible, for us.”
He adjusted the magnifying glass over his eye, tilting forward until the glass lens was almost touching the machinery. He made a couple of minute adjustments with the tool in his hand, then looked over at Alex.
“Care to put the finishing touches in?”
Alex ran a hand through his hair. “Well, I would, but I still can’t do any magic.”
Jari laughed. “No need for magic. Here.”
He pulled a magnifying glass from nearby and handed it to Alex, who strapped it over his eye. At once, the machine below him lurched into focus, each tiny gear sparkling and plain to see.
“See where that cog connects to that other one?” Jari said, pointing the two places out.
Alex nodded.
“Now watch this.”
A lick of gold wisped its way out, settling into the gears. At once, they began to turn, ever so slowly, as if in response to the power. Alex stared at it with fierce intensity. The machine was almost ready to move, but there was something missing. A link between the two cogs that Jari had pointed out.
The boy handed Alex a small pair of tweezers, squeezing the end. He looked at the tips of the tweezers through his lens and saw they were pinching the missing piece.
Slowly, painstakingly, Alex inserted the gear, then fastened it in place. When he was done, his hand was stiff from having been held so still throughout the process, and his neck was aching, but he felt satisfied that he had done a good job. Jari made no comment throughout, only nodding, and Aamir stared down at the machine in concentration without interfering.
When Alex was done, Jari reached out, adjusting the magical flow within the machine. The gears started to turn. With a click and a whir, a little puff of steam boiled up from some hidden, internal organ. The machine’s little legs began to kick and flick the air like a beetle turned on its back, and Alex instinctively reached out, righting it. Its legs hit the tabletop, and it skittered off along the wood workspace to collide with another boy’s project.
A volley of curses, insults, and threats followed. Alex ducked away, moving to where the beetle had fallen and picking it up. Its legs continued to move, but they seemed weaker, less coordinated somehow. Little trails of steam rippled up through the gaps in its clockwork hide.
A shadow fell over the machine, and Alex looked up to see Aamir standing over him, his dark eyes sparkling with amusement.
“You have worked on something like this before?”
“Sort of,” said Alex. “When I was a kid I went to a robotics workshop. I’ve never done anything exactly like this, but it’s just basic engineering, isn’t it?”
Jari bounced up beside Aamir with a broad smile. “We’ll have to come more often!” he said. “We always mess up the engineering part. Magic is way easier.”
Aamir glared. Jari returned the look, then corrected himself.
“I guess Aamir doesn’t always mess up the engineering.”
Aamir let out an offended huff of breath, and Alex looked over to see him leaning toward Jari with a scowl darkening his features. The two boys were an odd duo, to be sure. Alex watched as they turned in unison to a diagram on the table, each making sharp gestures as they shot their opinions at one another.
In his attempt to become more friendly with them, he’d asked about their backgrounds. Aamir was taken from New Delhi, India, while Jari had Greek roots, though he’d been living in America when he’d been “found”. Both had been strangely guarded when Alex had asked about their families. They’d tensed up, discomfort tracing their eyes, and returned similar answers—they’d prefer to not talk about it. Their responses had left Alex’s stomach feeling like a hollow pit: why had they been so reticent? After considering it, he came to the conclusion that it must simply hurt too much. Both were convinced they’d never escape this place. Thinking or talking about their families was just a recipe for pain. It scared Alex to realize he had already found himself constantly trying to push thoughts of his mother aside in an attempt to keep himself together—he was already utilizing Aamir and Jari’s method to cope with the separation.
But he could not end up like them. He could not.
“What do you think?”
Alex blinked, looking up just in time to see Jari and Aamir staring at him, both of their faces similarly demanding.
“Think about what?” he asked, pulling his mind back to the present.
“The design,” Aamir said, stabbing a finger at the little metal bug in Alex’s hand. “I think the methodology employed had some serious flaws.”
“At least it didn’t just give up and die,” Jari said.
“It lived too much.”
At this last note, Alex noticed that the student down the table, who had been fastidiously ignoring them, nodded sharply. Alex shrugged.
“I think it’s better to move than get stuck in one place. At least something happened. Here, let me see…”
Jari beamed at him, and Aamir sighed, running his hands through his hair. For a moment, his eyes seemed to glaze, looking at something else, somewhere else.
“I suppose,” he muttered.
There was a clattering from the walls, and the clocks began to chime, a cacophony of deep, booming notes mixed with high, tinny clinks.
“Curfew?” Alex asked, holding his ears.
Aamir continued to stare into space, so Jari stepped in to answer the question. “Yes,” he said. “We’ve got to get back to our rooms.”
“What if we don’t?” Alex asked, thinking of his after-dinner strolls in the garden.
Aamir shook his head, snapping out of his apparent trance. “You want to be back to your room before curfew,” he said simply.
“Hm,” said Alex. Another non-answer from Aamir.
As the trio made their way toward the door, Aamir suddenly stopped and threw out a hand. “Wait, wait,” he said, turning to Alex. “You don’t still have the beetle, do you?”
Alex nodded, holding out his hand to reveal the little clockwork creature, its legs now completely still.
Jari winced. “Ah, good point,” he said. “Alex, you can’t take those with you outside of the lab. They’re considered contraband.”
Alex proffered the item to Jari, who took it to the back of the room and put it in a little box labeled Petra. Then he came back to Alex and clapped him on the shoulder.
“Off we go, then!”
When they reached the room, Jari skipped across it in one bounding step to flop magnificently upon his mattress, bouncing once before landing on his back. Aamir watched him with a disapproving sigh, then looked at Alex as if to say, “Well, no helping that.”
“Here,” he said, reaching into a pocket and rummaging around. He pulled something out, and pressed it into Alex’s palm.
It was cold and firm, with a pleasing weight. Alex looked down to see a screwdriver, complete with a set of bits. He looked up at Aamir, surprised. Aamir pressed a finger to his lips and gave him a knowing look.
“You looked…happier. More at ease, near the machines,” he said. “I know how hard that can be when you first get here. Hell, it’s still hard now. So take that. It’s minor—I doubt you’ll get in much trouble for getting caught with it.”
Alex turned the screwdriver over in his hand, admiring it. This could be a very useful tool at some point. And Aamir was right, too—he had momentarily forgotten his constant tension in the lab, and focusing on something besides escape had been almost meditative for him.
“If you don’t want it,” Aamir said, “I can always take it back and—”
“No,” Alex said quickly. “Thank you. I appreciate this.”
A rare smile cracked Aamir’s lips. He gave a quick thumbs-up to Jari, who was sitting on his bed with an attentive expression.
Alex flopped backward. Well, Natalie had been right. He had learned a couple of new things about the manor, and it felt good to be on friendlier terms with his r
oommates. They certainly seemed excited about it.
But he still wasn’t sure he wanted to trust them with his secrets.
As he waited for Derhin’s class to begin the next day, Alex prepared himself for yet another awkward session where he would stand out as exceptionally incompetent. It was a disconcerting feeling, given that all his life he’d always been one of the, if not the, top student in his class.
“I can’t believe you still aren’t doing well,” said Jari later in Derhin’s class, shaking his head. “You and Natalie seem closer than ever. You’re always in the library together, or practicing at the tables. You shouldn’t still be having so much trouble!”
Aamir looked pensive, but said nothing.
Professor Derhin cleared his throat, a noise that was somewhere between a smoker’s rasp and the cry a mouse might make if stepped on by a steel-toed boot.
“Now that the class is actually here,” he said, eyeing some latecomers, “I think we can begin. However, first off—Webber, I’d like you to come to the front of the room.”
Alex almost didn’t register what he was hearing. He looked up at Professor Derhin with an uncertain expression, and the man waved with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve decided that today is the day we break that little block of yours.”
Alex felt his blood run cold.
He was supposed to have more time. He’d had an idea that if worse came to worst, and they were still at Spellshadow by the time his “few weeks” grace period was over, he’d ask Natalie to fake his magic. But he hadn’t discussed it with her yet because he was supposed to have at least one week more to go. He shot a look over his shoulder and saw Natalie wearing an anxious frown.
Crap.
“Up, up,” said Derhin, clapping his hands.
Alex rose to his feet, his eyes flicking around the classroom. Everywhere, eyes were focused on him. He became keenly aware of the cold in his bones, that cloying, ebbing feeling of emptiness. He had no magic.
“Sit on my desk,” Derhin instructed.