The walls had paintings of broken clocks against surreal landscapes with deserts and azure skies. Old film posters with yellowing edges hung next to them, and colorful geometric ornaments and other bric-a-brac lined whatever horizontal space in the room that wasn’t the floor. Clothes covered the length of the love seat by the window, and books lay carelessly everywhere, like Zizi had been reading a dozen different ones at the same time. Rui spied some titles on philosophy, history, and astrophysics, and one odd-looking book that had a plain white jacket and red lettering on its spine—The Elevenby J. Hesina.
The clutter felt deliberate. Like it was a show for someone else.
Rui sank back into Zizi’s bed. Her heartbeat elevated.It’s just a bed, she chided herself.A mattress, a thing with coils and foam, nothing more. It wasn’t even a comfortable one. She looked up with a sigh. The ceiling was painted like a map of the night sky, a rich indigo with thin white lines joining white dots into varying shapes. If she were an astrologer, she’d know the constellations, but stars never held her interest. They were too dangerous, like dreams that could cut you if you tried too hard to touch them. How often did Zizi lie here, pondering his false heaven?
Something rattled against the nightstand.
There were seventeen missed calls, seven voice messages, and twenty-four unread texts on her phone. They were all from Ada.
ARE YOU ALIVE?!?!shouted the last text.
The light shining through the window shutters told her it was midmorning. She’d been absent from campus the entire night. Ada had to be out of her mind with worry. But a Zizi did not exist in Ada’s world, and neither did a Rui with ties to the underground magic community. Rui wanted to keep it that way. How could she tell Ada about being attacked by the strange Revenant from last night without explaining who Zizi was and the work she did for him?
Rui had to lie again. There was no other way around it. That was the problem with keeping secrets. Sometimes, you had to tell a lie. To coverthat up, you told another lie, and then another and another, until the lies became the secret itself.
Rui placed her phone back on the nightstand next to her sword bag. As her mind came up with various excuses to hide the truth, she started to feel out of sorts. It wasn’t her injuries; those were physical, cuts and tears that would heal.
Something else had changed. There was a wrongnessinsideher.
She closed her eyes, searching for that place of quiet where her magic resided. Her fingers twitched. Her breathing grew strained.
There was nothing. Just the beat of her heart.
The spell she’d cast was supposed to be temporary, and the transfer of spiritual energy would last minutes. Why did her qi feel so out of flux now? Why did she feel so... hollow? Was it because the spell was meant for Revenants, and not humans?
Zizi. He would know what to do. He could reverse the spell. It was simple, wasn’t it? Child’s play for someone like him. Everything was going to be fine. Everythinghadto be fine. As if her thoughts had summoned him, there was a soft knock on the bedroom door.
“Rui?”
“Yeah?”
Zizi poked his head in. He had twisted his bangs back, securing them on top of his head with a metal hair clip. Rui wanted to remove it, let his hair spill over his eyes. She lingered a moment too long. Suddenly, he was looking at her looking at him.
Rui blinked away and pretended to yawn.
“You’re awake,” he said, stating the obvious.
“Mmmff,” she agreed from inside her blanket fort. “You can come in.”
Zizi flip-flopped into the room with a big mug of coffee in one hand. He placed the mug on the nightstand and sat on the side of the bed. Rui wished she had brushed her teeth or at least rinsed her mouth. There was a bruise blooming on his left cheekbone.
“What happened to your face?”
“Nothing.”
Rui cleared her parched throat. “Will the spell wear off soon?”
Zizi’s face did a complicated thing. He was angry and upset and afraid all at once. “Don’t freak out, but your core is damaged. There’re signs of deep magical trauma. Layers of trauma, not just from last night, but from before.”
He meant the night her mother was murdered. She’d never found out how she managed to scare the Revenant away.
“So it’ll take a while for me to heal, but can’t you reverse the spell first?” If she couldn’t train, it would mean postponing her retake of the simulation test.
Zizi mumbled, “I’ll explain everything downstairs.”
“Okay.” Rui shivered. “I’m freezing. Is this normal?”
The taut line of Zizi’s mouth didn’t match the softness in his eyes. “Why don’t you take a hot shower before you go down? Bathroom’s that way. Towels are inside, and your sweater too—I couldn’t figure out how to mend it, but at least I got the stains off with some scrubbing.”
