Yiran avoided Teshin’s curious gaze. “Time to give this a try.”
He brought his gloved hand to his chest. On the next exhale, he swept his arm out, fingers spreading, palm facing the empty wall of the workshop.
A shimmering crimson circle half the size of the wall formed in front of him.
He let out a victorious shout. He had never succeeded in creating such a large and stable defensive shield before. He held it for a few more seconds before pulling back. He was growing accustomed to his trigger point—an invisible line he imagined in his head. Cross it and his spirit core would burn. But each time he practiced, he nudged the line forward just a bit.
“He chose a defensive spell.” Tesha nodded at Teshin. “Just like you said he would.”
“It seemed safer to,” Yiran said, turning to Teshin. “How’d you know I would?”
“Logic,” they replied.
But Yiran felt there was more they weren’t saying. He raised his hand and tried to channel again. The glove sparked, and he yelped as the heat needled his skin.
“Sorry! It’s a prototype, so there might be some issues,” Tesha said. “It’s a chicken-and-egg situation, that’s what’s annoying.” She removed the glove for him and examined it. The weave pattern was warped in some areas.
Yiran asked, “What do you mean?”
“If you matched to a spiritual weapon already, I could leverage that to craft something to stabilize the leak. But if I can stabilize the leak first, I could probably make you a highly customized weapon you would match to. Thing is, stabilizing the leak is the more complicated way.” Teshastared out the window of the workshop at the Mak ancestral shrine, deep in thought. “I’ll have to rethink the design,” she murmured to herself.
But Yiran had latched on to what she had said. If what Tesha needed was a weapon he matched with, there might just be a way to make that happen.
The last bell was ringing when Yiran got back to the campus. He had memorized Rui’s schedule to keep track of her and knew exactly where to find her.
Just as he expected, she was walking out from her final lecture of the day, looking like one of Sweets’s blackberry-flavored lollipops. She had thrown an oversized sweater over her school uniform, and wore thick wool leggings tucked into angry boots. Unlike Ada’s cheery pops of pink among her darker clothing, black was Rui’s only color of choice.
Yiran straightened. She was carrying her sword bag like she always did.
The flow of cadets parted way for Rui as she trudged down the hallway, looking deep in thought. Yiran caught a few looks batted at her, curious ones that made him assume she was respected yet unliked—but only because she was unknown. Sometimes he couldn’t help but think they each were two faces of the same coin. Their methods were dissimilar, but equal. He pulled people in and lulled them into a false sense of proximity; Rui simply pushed people out.
He’d intentionally confided in her at the bench by the sea, and she’d softened toward him for a while as he predicted. But her scowl had returned soon enough, and now it was a magnificent one that could sink a thousand ships. It was her go-to expression whenever she looked at him. Yiran was getting fond of it.
He caught up to her. “Hey.”
Rui didn’t stop for him, so he walked with her.
“What do you want?” she said.
“Is there an Academy rule against saying hi to someone you know for no other reason than saying hi?” Yiran caught a faint smile on her face.
“You ignored everyone else and came right to me. What do you want?”
“How are you doing?”
“I’m fine.”
It took a liar to understand another, and Yiran was a very good liar. And it took someone who spent his life pretending to be untouchable to recognize someone else who was performing the same act with a different script.
Rui wasn’t fine at all.
She glanced up at him, something furtive in her eyes. “Is that all? I’m in a hurry.”
“I thought you were done with class. Where are you going?”
“Zizi’s.”
Had the wizard figured out how to reverse the spell? They’d exchanged a few brusque texts previously, but he’d gone silent in the last few weeks.
