Tessili Academy (7 page)

Now, she stared at the small amount of clear
liquid inside the tube and tried to decipher what she felt. Last
night, the very sight of Nylan had filled her with a sense of deep,
abiding hatred. But the syringe had excited her. Until he’d held
out his hand.
Give me your tessila.

Jey squeezed her eyes shut, trying to
remember more. She had no time. In a few more minutes she’d be late
for class. But if she waited, every hour that passed would increase
the chance that Nylan would realize the syringe was missing, that
he would connect it to her, that he would come asking
questions.

Phril, stressed by her agitation, pressed
his small body closer to the warmth of her neck. It was the horror
of the thought of him in Nylan’s hand that gave her the courage.
She rolled up her sleeve, pausing to note the pocked galaxy of pale
scars in the crook of her elbow. She took a deep breath, inserted
the needle into her arm, and pushed the plunger.

For half a second, nothing happened. Jey
removed the syringe and flopped back onto her bed to tuck it into
the nook in the wall with the stolen holdstone. She was becoming
quiet the little thief, she thought with a wry sense of
satisfaction.

Then, as she began to sit up, she felt the
change. The drug she’d injected raced through her veins like fire.
She had to clench her teeth to contain a scream.

And then, Jey remembered. Jey remembered
everything.

“Face your partner, bow. Now orderlies,
place your hand. Ladies, touch the shoulder. Good. Begin.”

The violin started up. Jey let herself be
guided into the first steps of the intricate dance. This time, she
did not hesitate. She flowed through the dance in perfect, smooth
execution, never missing a beat. Up the row of dancers, she saw
Elle stumble. But she didn’t look, didn’t let her head turn. She
kept her face blank, serene, false – the caricature of a pretty
doll.

After Jey had injected herself, she’d spent
approximately 15 seconds steeped in all-consuming rage. She’d
looked around at her familiar dorm room in blind anger, feeling the
sharp prickle of magic in her fingertips, knowing, suddenly, she
could blast the flashnode to shards of glass. She could rip the
door off its hinges, light the quiet garden of the dorm cloister on
fire. She could stalk through the academy and murder every orderly,
every professor. She could do it before they knew what hit
them.

But then what would happen? She’d have two
dozen terrified, broken girls on her hands, and nowhere to take
them. She was certain the orderlies had a contingency plan – some
prescribed action to take in the event a girl somehow did what Jey
had done, and remembered.

So, she did what they had trained her to do.
She sat up, took a moment to smooth her dress and her face, and
went to class.

Now, at least, she had some time to think.
Her body knew the dance. The hall was silent except for the
rustling of skirts, the pale notes of the violin, and Professor
Tucram’s low litany of instructions. When Jey had come in today,
she’d feared, briefly, there would not be enough holdstones for all
the tessili – that her first theft would be revealed in this
moment. But there were enough stones on the high table. Which meant
there was a good chance the missing stone had been noted. Whether
or not anyone suspected her, Jey could not know.

She couldn’t know, so she put it out of her
mind. She had to focus on what she did know. She whirled through
turn after turn. More and more memories surfaced in her mind. Most
of them took place at night, riding out across the moonlit road
towards the glittering town that lay in the valley below, holding a
passive echo spell in place around herself and her horse, so anyone
who might be able to see them would not register her presence.

Mostly, she remembered Nylan – his
glittering, hard eyes. She remembered the agony of being parted
from Phril, the implicit consequences of failure.

And she remembered something else, too.

Graduation.

Just thinking that word was enough to cause
the blind rage to try to rise again. She pushed it aside. Anger
would not help her right now.

Graduation happened every fall. Every fall,
the seniors walked across a small stage, shook the dean’s hand, and
received a diploma.

And every fall, Jey now knew, the seniors
died.

“L134, eyes straight ahead. No craning about
like that.” Jey heard Professor Tucram speak her friend’s number.
She had to fight the urge to look up the row of dancers to check on
Elle. Now that she knew everything, now that she could remember,
she worried she’d been premature with casting her spell on Elle’s
tessila. She didn’t envy the confusion her friend was now
experiencing, the stress of trying to blend in, of feeling
conspicuously awake among a group of sleepwalkers.

Jey no longer felt that way. She, after all,
had been trained extensively in the art of deception. She’d spent
hours learning how to read a room, to asses threat levels, to
infiltrate her target and carry out her mission. She was a weapon –
the culmination of 13 years of careful crafting.

Now, she wondered if it might be kinder to
pull the spell off Elle’s tessila, to expose her again to the
muddling effects of the flashnodes. As the dance took her closer to
the top of the hall and the bright row of tessili basking on their
holdstones, Jey could feel how easy it would be. One little tug,
and her spell would come free.

The dancers whirled, soft shoes whispering.
The violin played. Jey was soon two pairs from the top, one pair,
none. She reached out for the spell.

Elle’s purple tessila occupied a stone
towards the far end of the table. As Jey focused, the small
creature opened its eyes. They locked onto Jey. The tiny animal
seemed to understand what she would do. It deflated, somehow. It
closed its eyes again. Where before it had seemed content, now it
seemed desolate.

Jey hesitated. The dance moved her on. As
she wove her way through the steps, she let the spell settle back
into place. She understood, now, that she would not do it. The
thought of erasing what Elle had begun to learn felt a little too
much like murder. And while Jey had most certainly committed murder
before, she’d never done it of her own volition.

Elle, Jey and Kae walked into their rooms
together, white skirts swishing, tessili darting in the air around
their heads. Jey closed her eyes and took a deep breath as the door
latched behind them. They’d made it through the day, at last.

Kae, looking dreamy, wandered towards her
easel. She stopped before it and stood considering the
half-finished painting there as if she’d never seen it before.

Elle headed straight for the couch and
flopped onto the cushions. Now she gazed at Kae with a look of
haunted horror. “When are you going to tell Kae? You’re going to
put the spell on her tessila, too, aren’t you?”

Kae’s tessila, a bright speck of green in
the air, swept up to perch on the edge of the canvas. Jey sighed
and took her normal seat on the opposite end of the couch. A
hairbrush lay on the table. She seemed to recall an endless stretch
of evenings, of brushing out Elle’s hair, of weaving it into a
braid, of tying the braid off with a golden ribbon.

She shuddered and faced her friend. “Elle,”
she said, “there’s more.” Jey herself had managed to avoid using a
spritzer all day. She’d seen Elle use one several times. She now
suspected it was the effect of the spritzer’s drug that Nylan’s
shot had eradicated. “Give me your hand,” she said.

With a little grimace, Elle sat up. She
leaned forward, setting her cool fingers in Jey’s.

Jey closed her eyes. She tried not to think
overly hard about what she was doing. What she knew about magic was
accessible to her now, but also dim, somehow. It was as if those
memories were behind a screen of some kind, comprehensible only
through use. She could have cast the passive shield spell on Kae’s
tessila in a heartbeat, but she couldn’t have explained to Elle how
to do the same.

Now, she tried to feel inside her friend’s
body, comparing it to what she could feel of herself. Over the
course of the day, she’d become increasingly aware of a problem. If
the spritzer drug blocked her access to certain memories and
Nylan’s drug restored those memories, she had a finite amount of
time. Tonight, an orderly would come into her bedroom. He’d set his
hand on her forehead, watch the rise and fall of her chest. Then he
would mist the air above her with the drug that would make her
forget.

She couldn’t let it happen. The very thought
of it made her skin prickle with terror.

Jey spoke to Elle, making her voice low and
gentle. “You can make new memories, now, but you’re blocked from
your old ones. It’s because of the spritzer, the drug we inhale
several times a day.”

Elle nodded. Above them, the flashnode went
off. Kae, across the room, went briefly still.

Jey tried to focus more deeply on her
friend. “I can’t get more syringes. It was only the sheerest dumb
luck I ever got one in the first place. Which means, we need
another way.”

Elle’s brow crinkled. Jey could see the
tension in her, the fear and confusion. On reflex, Elle reached for
the spritzer bottle that sat on the low table next to the couch.
Then she froze, grimaced, and let her hand fall back to her
lap.

That gave Jey an idea. She reached for the
bottle herself and set it in her lap. Then she closed her eyes.

She tried to approach the problem. There was
the drug in the bottle, and there was the drug in her friend. The
drug affected her friend’s ability to remember. She thought about
weaving a spell that would be attracted to the drug, that would
burn it up like Nylan’s shot had done.

Across the room, Kae continued to paint. Jey
rose, collecting a saucer from the tea tray. She unscrewed the top
of the spritzer and poured a few drops of the drug onto the saucer.
Then she closed her eyes, wove a spell, and released.

She felt magic pour from her. She felt it
react with the drug. There was a soft glow in the air above the
saucer, then the little pool of liquid was gone.

Jey turned to Elle, who was watching her
with wide, dark eyes. “I can try to burn the drug out of your
veins,” she said. “If I succeed, you’ll know everything.”

Elle looked at Kae, who wasn’t showing the
faintest curiosity in what they were doing. She gave a tremulous
laugh and said, “What if you don’t succeed?”

Jey felt her heart give a clench. She
lowered herself back into her seat. Around them, the academy was
quiet. The orderlies went out of their way, she knew now, to keep
it that way, to make the place feel peaceful, serene, and safe.

It was all a horrible lie.

She looked her friend in the eye. “I don’t
know,” she said. As far as she could recall, she’d never tried any
magic like this before. It was improvisational. What had worked in
a saucer might not work in the human body. But she had no time to
come up with anything better. “It could kill you, I suppose.”

Elle closed her eyes. Her tessila, purple
and small, shoved his way into the curl of her relaxed hand. Elle
said, “We’re going to die anyway, soon. Aren’t we?”

Jey looked at Kae. She was still painting,
her face smooth and blank, untroubled. “Yes,” Jey said. “We have
six months, at the most.”

Elle looked down and ran her finger along
her tessila’s chin. Her eyes were luminous with tears. She said,
“Then we have to try.”

A storm blew in with nightfall. When an
orderly came into their room to close the windows, all three girls
were engaged in perfectly normal activities. Kae was painting. Elle
had taken up an embroidery hoop. Jey was holding a sketchbook and a
pencil. Phril was on the table, posing.

None of the girls reacted when the orderly
entered. He moved quickly but smoothly, drawing the windows shut
and latching them against the rain that was starting to patter on
the panes. As he left, he said over his shoulder, “Almost time for
bed, girls.”

They all made small, vague noises of assent.
Then the door closed.

Kae turned to look at the door, eyes hard.
“I can’t think why we shouldn’t kill them all now.” Her voice was
low, full of the burning anger Jey felt in her own heart when she
thought about all that had been done to her.

Elle tied off a piece of thread. Her voice
was mild when she answered. “You don’t mean that, Kae. For all we
know the orderlies don’t know any more than we did.”

Jey listened to them talk with a sense of
quiet wonder. It had worked. Her clumsy, improvised spell had
worked. She’d blasted the drugs out of her two friends. They’d
spent the last hour practicing, each taking a deep inhalation of
the spritzer mist, then letting the others burn it away. All three
of them found the spell quite easy to execute.

Jey had also experimented with blocking the
spritzer from affecting her at all, at containing the drug as soon
as it entered her system. She wasn’t able to get it all on the
first go, but it didn’t seem to matter. The drug didn’t act quickly
enough to make her forget how to work the spell before she had the
time to cast it several times.

Which meant, Jey was no longer in danger of
forgetting.

While her roommates were still struggling to
come to terms with their new self-awareness, Jey was experiencing a
sense of giddy relief. She wasn’t alone anymore. Her friends
remembered. She remembered. Between the three of them, she thought,
they would find a way out.

Kae was quiet, as if surprised by Elle’s
comment. She paused, paintbrush held aloft, face thoughtful. “I
guess you might have a point, there. What about the
professors?”