But I can do this.
I can do this.
The day before our presentation, I’m due to meet Thio in our lab so we can officially submit our paper to the university’s online portal. He had a breakfast meeting with Arasne, and I left his place early this morning to hit the library again—and it paid off.
Because now.
I stumble into the lab, letting the door shut behind me, and he’s at his workstation with his laptop open. Lesiara U’s assignment website is pulled up, and I know he has our paper loaded into the submission window already.
Around him, his hurricane of stuff is in semi-neat piles, his notes and clothing and food. We have to be out of here by next week, before graduation.
Thio looks up at me with an exhausted smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. His smiles haven’t, not in weeks, especially not on days when he meets with Arasne.
That ghost of a smile immediately breaks off when he sees me, and he launches up from his chair. “What’s wrong?”
“I figured it out.”
My eyes burn, I haven’t slept since… yesterday? I know I tossed and turned all night in his bed. I’m shaking from an excess of coffee, my stomach aches, but I’m smiling, gasping; did I run here from the library? Maybe.
Thio frowns. “Figured what out?”
I push past him, pulling stuff out of my bag as I stumble to thewhiteboard. It’s my turn to make a distracted, chaotic mess, and I leave a trail of highlighters and loose papers. But I find the notes I’m looking for, unhook my bag and let it splat on the floor, and grab a dry-erase marker from the tray.
“Your mom’s project,” I say to the board and uncap the marker in my mouth, spit out the lid to the side. I copy the notes I scrawled in a twisting spiral around an already crammed paper—I’ve been spending too much time with Thio, he’s all over me.
He steps up to the board. “My mom’s—”
But he stops talking. Watches me write, scribbling out the theory I nailed down this morning.
It’s my theory. Well, his theory, the measuring cup theory.
His mom was trying to disconnect a conjurer from their conjured item. But the energy has to come fromsomewhere,and since conjuration demands that energy come from a conjurer, the conjurer is, in theory, the component.
I don’t absorb that. Don’t let it affect me. It’s different from what happened at Camp Merethyl, and this? This solution? Would keep conjurers safe.
I keep writing, sketching out the runes I altered to fit this idea. “The safety net runes? Instead of protecting any material component, they could also act as a capon the conjurer. Once a threshold of energy has been drained from a conjurer, we can set it up to trigger the spell to disconnect, and the item will return to where it came from, protecting the conjurer.”
I all but drop to my knees when I turn to Thio.
It isn’t a perfect disconnect between a conjurer and their conjured item, but it’ssomething. Something for him.
Thio reads over everything, his brow furrowed.
He takes the marker from me and rewrites one of the runes I made, adding other elements.
I see it, and frown.
“Or,” he says, “the safety net runes could be adjusted to spread the energy draw among multiple conjurers, so it isn’t reliant on only one person. The limits would still be in place; Conjurer A would beconnected to the conjured item until they hitXthreshold of energy drain, then it’d shift to Conjurer B, and so on. The conjured item wouldn’t vanish, and—oh gods, Sebastian. This could work. This could—oh my gods.”
He scrawls out test equations next to the rune.
“Wait.” I scrub my eyes under my glasses and splay my hands out. “That would—you can’t force another conjurer to take onyourspell. That’s not—” I point at the board. At my original rune. He’s not looking at me. “This is aboutprotectingconjurers.”
Thio mouths something to himself as he writes. Absently, he says, “My project’s about the energy connection between a conjurer and their item. This way, the energy connection is dissipated among a group, and the item remains. It isn’t—”
“It isn’t about keeping the item; it’s about protecting the conjurers.”
“Theywouldbe protected. Once the threshold is reached, it’d shift to a different conjurer.”
