The Awakening of Ren Crown (17 page)

“That is your side.” She pointed to the empty bed and desk on the window side of the room.

My thoughts and words all crashed together. “What? Really? I mean, yes, great!” The feeling that I was in the right place intensified, then slowly dissipated.

There was a curiously blank look to her expression, all tightness gone. As if she had no emotional reaction to me at all anymore. “You stay on your side, I'll stay on mine.” And with that, she turned to her desk and an enormous tome that was placed there.

“Oh. Er, thanks.” She hadn't even asked me my name.

I quietly walked to the empty desk on the far side of the room. The energy that had been capped by Marsgrove's cuff was restless now, pushing and leaking, as if it had tasted freedom for a moment and now refused to be denied. The room's magic hummed around me.

Well, that had gone pretty well, actually. Totally antisocially, but having a roommate who didn't care what I did was exactly what I needed.

Loneliness pushed. I shoved it back.

I dropped my papers on the desk, then pulled Marsgrove's storage paper from under my camisole where it had been pressed against my back. Just in case I needed to travel quickly, I wasn't taking any chances. The storage paper was ingenious. There were a number of shelves drawn inside, and I had figured out last night at the inn that I just needed to concentrate on the item I wished to remove in order to have the proper shelf slide forward. From there, I could pinch and remove the desired item.

Putting things in and taking them out provoked a weird feeling inside of me, though. As if the paper knew I wasn't its true owner, and though it was reluctantly willing to let me use it, it issued a vague feeling of chastisement each time.

I had tried briefly to use Will's imprisonment sketch as a storage option, but the paper had remained impassive beneath the paperclip I was trying to insert. When I had willed it to accept the paperclip, the paperclip had detonated into a million fragments.

There had been a distinct feeling of disdain emanating from the sketch afterward. I was either truly certifiable, or I was going to need to embrace anthropomorphism in a more acute way.

I concentrated on Marsgrove's paper, then pinched and removed the overnight bag I had packed in the inn. Everything else would stay in the paper until I was more secure in my location. A sound alerted me, and I turned my head to see Olivia looking at my paper, a strange expression on her face.

“What?” Too late I realized that Marsgrove had called it priceless. But Mr. Verisetti and I had created one—somehow—and I had zero magical intelligence. Surely others existed.

Olivia's eyes narrowed on the paper, then she turned back to her giant book. Alarm spiked the energy residing under my cuff, and it started pushing.

If the storage paper was that valuable, I was going to have to figure out a way to secure it. I stared at the desk. I pictured a locked security box with a big, fat, unpickable lock.

There was a sudden whirling sound, and I stumbled back in alarm, hands up, as I stared at the desk.

The legs, desktop, and braces were breaking apart and hooking around and up, over and around, morphing into the locked security box I had been imagining.

The desk…was a Transformer.

Whoa, whoa. The energy escaping around the cuff was delighted. The first chapter of Marsgrove's primer had touted meditation. I tried to shift my mental image of the locked box into the calm peeling of rose petals. My desk legs changed directions and began to take on a distinctly floral shape. Olivia's writing motions slowed.

I put my hands out, trying to signal the desk to stop, but the stem wrapped around my arm. “No, not me, you. Stop!”

The desk became a stop sign, a boat, a bird, then a disembodied foot, flattening me to the ground. I struggled, fingertips just clutching the edge of my overnight bag and pulling it toward me, as the foot pressed harder. Olivia sat with her back to me, ignoring the whole thing. I shuffled through the administration packet, giving a grunt as the foot found and pressed a kidney. Why not a kitten? My desk turned into a roaring lion resting on my back. Oh, dear God. I frantically shuffled through the papers, fingers horribly sweaty as the lion batted at my hair. I madly read through the paper titled “Room How-tos.”

“Reset!” I yelled.

And then I was awkwardly wedged under a normal, unexciting four legged desk once more. I allowed my head to drop to the floor. Olivia's pen scratched her page, loud in the sudden quiet of the room.

My hand holding the paper dropped too. Thank God the administration papers had been in my overnight bag. I gracelessly extricated myself, read the instructions, and finally got the coding right. The desk became a nice normal workstation with a tabletop easel similar to the one I had at home. I made sure to utter “Set” twice, just in case.

I looked at the time to see an hour had passed and gave a strangled laugh, cheeks burning. “Uh, sorry about that,” I said to my roommate. “We didn't have these at my old school.”

Olivia, who was still writing, didn't respond. Her back was turned to me, as if a new roommate spending an hour trying to make her desk work was nothing out of the ordinary. She hadn't even spared me a glance, which made the episode a little less embarrassing, but seemed beyond weird.

Maybe everyone had this type of trouble? Somehow, I doubted it.

I walked to the window, determined to do something safe and normal for a few minutes. The room had an extraordinary view down the mountain, instead of up toward the higher levels. Strange animals hopped in the trees, and little explosions rocked a building a half-mile away. Sparks and lightning shot jets of fire into the midday sky. There were thick clouds a few levels below and massive shapes dove through them. I couldn't believe my roommate hadn't chosen the window view. But her crisply made bed was across the room and it was the bare one that was pushed up against the outer wall.

“Is—ouch!” I jumped as something zapped me. I turned to see Olivia staring over the top of her glasses in disapproval.

“I don't like to be disturbed.” She turned back to her tome.

I stared at the back of my new roommate’s tightly bound head, then looked back out the window. The jumpiness that had been my constant companion since I had entered the coffeehouse days ago wouldn't settle. My last therapist would say I was suffering from anxiety.

I took catalog of my new illegally-obtained room. It was Spartan. Two beds, two outwardly normal-looking desks, two bureaus, a cupboard and three large mechanical box contraptions. Olivia's side was neat and pine-fresh. If it weren't for her books, there would be nothing personal on her side at all. And the types of books—with spines bigger than my head—weren't what I would have normally called personal.

I thought of my walls at home—before I had killed them. They had been completely cluttered. If I stayed here more than a week and didn’t temper my usual stress relief activities, Olivia was going to be in for a rude shock.

I was bursting with questions on everything from how to get off the mountain to how to raise the dead to how to work
any
spell. I couldn't ask those, though, if I wanted to appear normal. But I could ask her a general question. I waited for her to close her giant book and to set aside her journal.

“Do—ouch!”

She set down the sharp little metallic rod that she had used to zap me again. “I don't like to be interrupted while I am changing tasks.”

I rubbed my arm. “Do you like to be spoken to at all?”

“No. You should refrain.”

I reminded myself that this was a good thing. It was like hiding out in plain sight at an inn that just happened to have an ornery troll who lived in the corner but didn't speak.

Ornery cat. Troll had my imagination conjuring pictures of her eating former roommates.

She disappeared into the bathroom, which I had also quickly cataloged as utilitarian, and I leaned my head against the window. I didn't want to unpack, just in case, but it was going to look suspicious if I did nothing.

I made the bed. I would be sad to lose my cozy sheets and Guernica comforter, but I had learned the hard way six weeks, four days, and nine hours ago that things were replaceable, people weren't. I put a few changes of clothes in the bureau and set up my toiletries—also disposable—in a free nook above the sink.

The picture of Christian and me at the beginning of summer was soon perfectly squared on the windowsill next to the bed. A photo of the four of us at a family wedding, and another of us after one of his football games, went up too. None of these were disposable, but the originals were on the server at home. And I needed the comfort.

I looked at Will's sketch. The drapes were still there, but the rubbish in front had disappeared at some point when I hadn't been looking. I propped the heavy paper against the wall near my pillow.

But as much as I wanted to crawl under my covers and never emerge, I couldn't afford to hide. I had to find the answers I needed in order to resurrect Christian.

Olivia started edging around the room, gathering things, flicking her wrist to call things to her. She obviously had to depart, but was reluctant to leave me alone in the room. This made me feel better, somehow. If she had been worried about me earlier, she'd have just run out and gotten a...police mage, or something...to arrest me. Her actions spoke more of a long-term evaluation of what harm I might be capable of inflicting. She did a number of complicated things to her stuff before she left. Probably warding me against poking.

Stone-faced and unblinking she left, and I began poking.

The first two mechanical boxes ended up being some sort of refrigeration and reheating units. I decided to label them strangely with words like “fridge” and “microwave.” The last one was a black box similar to Marsgrove's. Some sort of delivery unit?

I checked out her neat stash in the cupboard. There were a lot of “Magi Mart” labels.

I could see the papers on her desk and notes on her bulletin board. All of the notes were perfectly squared and visible. I didn't need to rummage through anything. One of the notes said “Rule the World” in perfect block letters. I blinked. Underneath was a list in shorthand code that I couldn't make sense of.

I decided not to touch anything on her desk after all.

But I needed to learn the door lock, so I could enter quickly, as if I actually possessed a key. Scrubbing was the fastest method for easy locks, but the sounds were like...well, like you were illegally picking a lock. If Olivia were inside at the time, then game over.

I opened the door and poked my head out. I waited for a pixie-like girl to walk by before I wedged my foot into the opening and curled my hands into place, forcing my muscles to relax as I figured out which pin had to be set first, then which second. Three, Four, Two, Five, One. I stared at the brass placard on the door that read fifty-two and attached the order sequence, as well as the physical memory of what force needed to be applied to the torque wrench, to my mental image of the placard.

It would take me six seconds to open the door now. With a little practice, I'd get that down to three. Magic locks or physical scanners would have screwed this plan from the get-go.

I curled up on “my” bed and looked out the window. Groups trudged past below, people laughing and talking, engaged in normal relationships and activities. Happy. Silence stretched around me. Even if I'd been a real student, entering midway through the school year sucked. Groups were well-established. I had seen it all over campus as I'd frantically dashed by.

Loneliness sat in my gut, as it had for weeks now, morosely staring at me.

Whatever. I didn't need friends. I needed Christian.

I pulled Marsgrove's paper toward me and retrieved two journals. Sitting on top of my Guernica bedspread, I sketched the day's events into my personal journal, logging the emotion and actions in pictured form.

I closed my journal and looked at the clock on the wall with its weird hands and inscriptions that made no sense. It was similar to an astronomical clock, but there was a “shift” hand and an “enchantment” hand and the signs of the zodiac doubled to twenty-four. I wondered who had dreamed up the zodiac first—people here or people in my Layer. I opened up my phone, which was gamely keeping time in airplane mode. There was something that vaguely resembled an electrical outlet in the wall near my desk that I would have to test at some point, if I wanted my cell to continue ticking, but I'd wait until I absolutely had to test it.

By comparing my phone with the wall clock, I guessed that noon would be the Sagittarius at the bottom.

Ok. I just had to adjust my metric and figure out how to tell minutes—the disc in the middle maybe? I looked around for some sort of wizard phone and a phone book. It would be really handy to call Will right about now, but I had no idea how to even begin that kind of search. I could try hanging out in front of the dorm, but what if his dorm section was on the other side of the mountain circle?

“
Help me.”

The plaintive call hurt. It curdled my insides with the knowledge that I wasn't able to do anything to stop the pain. It was past time to gain that knowledge.

I pushed the administration documents around until I unearthed a brochure for the Student Center. It proclaimed itself to be a one-stop spot for new students, for students seeking information on changing disciplines, and for internship searches. The building was located on the sixth circle, which meant it was close—one level down from the dorms. I could walk that. Thank God, for if it had been on the, like, twentieth circle, it would have involved a hike of three thousand feet or attempts at thirty random arches.

I gathered my things, securing the storage paper and Will's prison paper onto opposite sides of my torso again. Everything else went into my pack. I'd grab a bunch of papers and guides from the center, then hurry back here to sort through everything.

Shoulders hunched tightly, head lowered so as not to make eye contact, I walked down the first section of stairs. As I rounded the landing, uproarious feminine laughter caused me to raise my head. A boy was levitating up two steps at a time, with his hands steepled in front of him, and a group was cheering him on.