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The horizon was on fire. Smoke pumped out of a hot maelstrom on the other side of the woods, trees going up like torches, ash billowing through the air, and Gandalf’s ears were pinned back, which meant he was hearing something Gem wasn’t. Maybe something like sirens.
Gem had crashed as soon as she saw it, winning her a number of scrapes and bruises. She didn’t begrudge her body the pain, either; it was relieving to be able to feel it, after the incident with Scott. Her magic may have been shocked into hiding like a seedling after a late-spring frost, but her nerves were returning to normal. She could flex her fingers, bend her toes. The white in her hair had stayed a pale ribbon threaded through her braid, instead of spreading like Katherine had been worried it would.
That fire was definitely spreading, though. It wouldn’t get past the defenses at the Crystal Cliffs city limits, but the scrubland between the towns was in for a bad time.
“Don’t call me out if I’m wrong here, Gandalf, but whatever happened there doesn’t seem like it went according to plan.”
Gandalf growled in that cat's way that always startled her to hear– granted, he also did that whenever someone rang Sausage’s doorbell, so it might not have meant anything– and stalked over to her broomstick, pawing at it pointedly. Gem sighed and picked it up, not bothering to swing a leg over and try for flight. Her nerves had been rattled. Her left thumb was going numb again. That meant flight was not about to happen.
She knew exactly what had blown up. The Apothecary– really a factory, except it was for mass-producing potions and their hometown had a lot of wizards, so the name had stuck– was known for its unstable production lines. Atmospheric magic was fickle, impulsive, prone to shying upon being observed: someone might have done a little experiment and frightened it off, and then whatever mechanisms had been relying on that magic would have gone haywire. It was a good thing that the engineers had designed it to run on autopilot; the thought of anyone being trapped in the flame would have been terrible, otherwise.
FWhip would be upset about the situation, probably. He loved tinkering. If she ventured closer, noted some details for him to pore over later– except, no, the rules were very clear on that point. Even if she’d wanted to get a closer look at the disaster, she wouldn’t have been allowed. Gem grimaced and started back for Sausage’s house.
The Apothecary was within Grimlands city limits, and in her first year of training, a wizard was never supposed to return to the city of her birth. It had to be a clean cut, an amputation ; she hadn’t been allowed to even talk to FWhip before being sent away, and he was her twin brother. Independence in wizards was a cultivated trait.
*
The news the next day was focused on the Apothecary fire, cameramen inching closer to the wreckage and being shooed off by irritated city employees. The flames had climbed past the canopy, said the reporter, reaching up at low-lying clouds and seeding them with magical residue. The horizon was alternating between colors, sometimes as red as spilled blood, other times a deep dragon’s-eye violet. Containment efforts were under way.
“That is so weird,” Sausage said, lounging beside her. He had his feet up on his parents’ coffee table, which he’d etched with a summoning circle that Gem didn’t and would never trust enough to touch. There were unopened letters on the table, addressed in familiar handwriting. Gem folded her hands in her lap and stared firmly at the TV screen, curling into the blanket around her shoulders. She was always cold, these past couple weeks. At night, if she didn’t focus, her breath condensed in front of her face. “Don’t you think that’s weird, Gem? Rainbow-colored fire! An explosion that keeps happening! This would never happen in Mythland.”
“You were trapped in an alternate universe for six days in Mythland,” Gem said. “You resurrected your dog in Mythland, and now you’re sitting here telling me that you haven’t had one multidimensional fire?”
“Hmm, no, and you can’t prove otherwise, so there,” Sausage said, and leaned forward, chin on his fist. “Hey, does FWhip work at the Apothecary?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Gem said. “I haven’t— you would know better than I do, I’m not allowed to contact him until my year is up—“
“Sure, yeah, and he was fine last week when I visited, and incidentally I visited my parents at the same time because my compulsion to break rules is very strong and you could easily do the same—“
“I’m doing it properly, if you’ve been together since the womb you can handle a year apart, that’s reasonable, that is, it’s–”
“Ooh, isn’t that FWhip running into the building now?”
Gem startled to her feet. Somehow, her broomstick made it into her hands. Funny, that. She could have sworn it’d been propped against the wall. “Tell me it’s not,” she said, aghast. “He wouldn’t. He’s not that dumb!”
“Red hair, check,” Sausage said, eyes narrowing. “Modified elytra, check. Goggles, the height checks out, same outfit as last week, oh, look, he’s past the caution tape!”
“But it’s exploding, what is he doing?” Gem shrilled. She couldn’t tear her eyes from the screen. FWhip had ducked under the tape with confident, casual ease, the face he put on that said I’m a tinkerer so I definitely won’t make this explosion worse, and someone authorized this, probably, right? You want to check on that first. Or you don’t want to bother your supervisor at all, man, you’re just gonna let me by.
It had worked when they were ten, except back then they’d had to pretend to be Grim Scouts on a planned field trip who just wanted some extra credit, and Gem had used her magic to help. Now, at fourteen, FWhip looked old enough to apprentice. He’d cut his hair shorter, sheared off his bangs. He was pausing when he got to the front door, glancing over his shoulder like he meant to say something, and Gem knew what it was because she did the same thing, still, when she was sleepy or in an unfamiliar environment. She looked over her shoulder for FWhip, because he should have been there backing her up. She had to bite back quips she’d come up with on autopilot for his ears alone.
The cameraman exclaimed something, but FWhip was in the building at that point, door shut behind him. He was too good to get caught by a news anchor of all people.
Not too good to avoid dying horribly in the inevitable next explosion, though. Gem’s hands sparked, pins and needles stabbing through her half-numb fingers. “He,” she said, and had to stop to calm herself. “He– Sausage , did you see –”
“I’ll teleport you,” Sausage said, turning off the TV. Gem rounded on him. He raised his hands innocently. “Then it’s not traveling home, right? No one can fault you for that.”
Of course they could fault her for that. They’d fault her for the letters FWhip sent her, never mind that Sausage was the one who read them while Gem covered her ears in case he decided to tell her something interesting from them. They’d probably fault her for seeing FWhip on television, honestly.
Well, whatever. Her instructors could deal. “Since when can you teleport people?” Gem demanded. Sausage went over to his bedroom, to the closet his laundry basket always blocked. There was a suspicious purple glow under the door. “Sausage, I don’t have my magic right now. I’m useless, I wouldn’t be any help even if it weren’t against the rules–”
Sausage yanked the door open and shoved her forward, making her yelp and shove him back on principle. “You weren’t complaining about illegal last month with the dragon hatchlings, now no questions! No complaints! Just go!”
Gem stared into the twisting violet light in Sausage’s closet, shivering despite herself, and clutched her broomstick tight. “I could barely fly earlier,” she protested. “I kept falling, that’s why I took so many of your Band-Aids!”
Sausage clapped her on the shoulder, his own magic buzzing around her skin like an insistent horsefly. Sometimes he parasitized other people’s magic, drawing it in for himself, but this time it was like he was drinking up the worst of the cold, instead– like the numbness was ebbing back, exposing nerves like dead things in a retreating shoreline.
He gave her a sickly smile. “You’ll do fine,” he assured her, pale and shaking. “I believe in you. Believe in the me that believes in you, that’s a famous quote, right? Right? Come on, get going.”
“Fine,” Gem said, and caught his hand from her shoulder to squeeze it tight. “But if this murders me I’m haunting you. And you need to seek medical help!”
Sausage nodded. Gem plunged in.
The portal spat her out into a shrieking blue-green cloud, which lashed at her arms and tried to engulf her until gravity snatched her down. Gem shrieked and plummeted, squeezing her eyes shut and thinking flyflyflyfly with all her heart; the broomstick jerked to the side and spun like a drill bit, then wobbled into a stable potion.
The Apothecary fire somehow looked worse from above. Magenta flames had swallowed the whole eastern side, blackening it into molten bubbling rock and sending noxious fumes into the air. Blue fire danced across the rooftops and turned concrete to diamonds, lingered on a glittering lump the size of a person that might have been a person before the explosion, though Gem had enough magic to tell that it hadn’t been FWhip– yellow simmered in the grass and chased insects down to incinerate them– purple climbed the walls and reached up to her, grasping, forming faces with arms and claws to coax her down.
Wizard. Wizard, wizard, wizard, the fire was chanting, mindless. Atmospheric magic usually hit magical people when it went wrong; that was likely what had spurred FWhip to go into the building in the first place, that he wasn’t magical and might be overlooked. Total lack of magic was pretty rare in the Grimlands. Wizard. Wizard.
“Shush,” Gem hissed. “I’m here for my brother. And I’m not in the Grimlands either, so if anyone summons you to ask later, you just tell them that.”
Her damaged nerves prickled, cold shooting through her muscles. The broomstick wavered, fell several feet; she yanked it to the side, out of the fire’s reach, and pulled back to circle around, breathing hard.
Where would FWhip be, in this cataclysm of magical intention? Harming mingled with Strength mingled with Regen, Feather Fall, a good helping of sheer atmospheric malice– the central control room, maybe, to suck all the oxygen out of the inside of the Apothecary, shut the doors to keep the threat contained? Some quarantined room within, to rescue a friend?
“FWhip!” Gem yelled over the howling wind, the crackling flames. If there were reporters out now, she couldn’t see them. She got the feeling they must have been forced farther back, to safety. Well, safety could stuff it. “FWhip, where are you? Don’t make me land, you jerk, you’ll force me to break the rules!”
Wizard, the flames were muttering. WizardwizardWIZARD.
Gem gritted her teeth and aimed for the highest point of the Apothecary, the great tower in the center that the flames hadn’t quite reached. She had to kick the glass in, shoving magic at the runes to prove she was Grimlands-certified and it should let her break it, and then she was wriggling inside, pulling her broomstick in behind her.
“FWhip!” she shouted again. “I happen to need you, you know! You can’t just die on me!”
Two doors at the top of the tower. One of the doorknobs was agonizingly hot to the touch; the other was cold, spreading diamond across the frame. Gem glared and kicked the cold door down, pulled her cloak around her and dashed through the blue flames. It turned to diamond; she dropped it and took the stairs several at a time.
“FWhip!” she yelled a third time, holding a handful of her shirt up to her mouth to block the worst of the smoke, and this time heard a muffled answer.
“Gem?”
“Where are you?” Gem called, scanning the hall. The EXIT signs loomed out of the haze, feverishly bright; she ran the opposite way, magic running ahead, looking for that familiar sense of brother. She’d always won their games of hide and seek. “Answer me, speak up!”
“Gem!” came the voice again, sounding angry– oh, he had no right to sound angry– and Gem pulled to a halt at the end of the hallway, blocked by a wall of yellow-purple flames, of hot monstrous plasma coalescing into figures to stand in her way.
Wizard, the fire murmured. The door behind it belonged to the control room. It had been sealed shut with diamond, blue fire lapping at its corners; through the observation window, she could see FWhip’s furious face, a cut bleeding on the side of his jaw. He looked taller. If he was taller than her now, she would be so upset, she–
“What are you doing here, you idiot?” FWhip demanded. “I’m not magic! I’ll just suffocate, I started the countdown already– Gem, you dolt, it wants wizards, it wants you!"
It looked like she’d made the right decision, coming here. Whether someone had sent FWhip to do the job, reasoning that he was the one non-magical tinkerer in the city, or he’d sent himself– whether he’d originally intended to get out or taken it as a damn suicide mission–
“Well, it has me,” Gem said, and suddenly Scott’s eternal cold was a blessing, another shield beneath her skin. A few extra seconds between her and immolation, and her own magic seethed up beneath, hotter than any fire from an accident. That was her brother trapped there. Gem was incandescent. “Let’s just see if it can keep hold of its prey. Stand back, FWhip!”
“Gem,” FWhip snapped, voice cracking, but he stepped back, because she was the older sister. She had him beat by five minutes, and that meant she was in charge. “You need to get out, get out, Gem, there’s five minutes on the clock–”
The flames had faces now. Wizard. Wizard, you are ours –
Gem was an Arctic volcano, luminescent with cold. She could do this. Confidence was key in magic, and at this moment she had it in spades.
“Shut up,” she told FWhip and the flames both, because neither of them seemed very smart at the moment, and walked into the fire.