I hike down the lane to the country road before summoning a ride, knowing from experience that the driver is more likely to find me if I’m a little closer to civilization. The whole way home, whenever my mind veers toward Elodie—toward her pine-green eyes with the inner ring of gold I never noticed before, toward the elegant slope of her nose and line of her jaw and other curves farther below—I dig my fingertips into my leg to the point of pain.
I’ve got plenty of other problems to focus on, after all. When I walk into the house, Mom emerges from the living room to greet me, and the first words out of her mouth are, “So, how did the transmutation presentation go?”
My throat closes around my answer. A heat that’s all shame creeps up my neck at having to recall my stupid stumble in the middle of my demonstration.
As I pull together the words to answer, Elodie’s voice floats up from the back of my head.
“No one’s perfect. No one should criticize you because you’re not.”
Don’t I wish she was right about that one thing.
Twenty-Six
Elodie
When Stella suggested we evaluate each other’s Defensive Tactics assignments after class, I couldn’t think of a reasonable excuse to refuse.Sorry, I can’t study because I need to studywasn’t going to cut it.
Anyway, I don’t want my friends getting overly curious and interrupting my investigations now that I might really be getting somewhere.
Out of Other Elodie’s four besties, Stella’s sophisticated vibe is definitely the easiest to tolerate, even if every now and then I catch her giving me an assessing look that feels kind of judgy. I’ve been judging the heck out of my double too, so who am I to complain?
And it turns out she has a talent for figuring out how to fend off magical mind assaults. She makes a couple of suggestions to tweak Other Elodie’s project that would make it at least a little less likely some unknown enemy could fry my brain.
I’m hoping I’ll never have to present the assignment anyway, but I can still appreciate the gesture.
“Thanks for the tips,” I say as we head out to the front of the school to wait for our chauffeurs.
“Not a problem.” Stella flashes me a smile. “That’s what friends are for, aren’t they?”
Hard to say, with friends like these. But it is starting to feel overly insulting to compare her to a dog, even a graceful one.
Even if my doppelganger’s friends are all snobs, I don’t have to sink to their level.
Her driver arrives first—naturally, because I only pretended to text Maurice. I wave good-bye, wait until the sedan has cruised around a corner farther down the street, and then head south.
It’s a tricky balance, looking like I’m taking a casual stroll while actually hurrying. Most of Other Elodie’s notes about “DVB” indicated times within a couple of hours after regular classes end at Luminary. I don’t want to lose my chance to figure out what my double might have been recording about our sister school.
If Beacon Prep even is what my double was referring to.
I push my doubts aside as I amble along the sloping street that slants up past our graduate studies building and then down toward the Beacon campus. One small benefit of the delay: there are fewer Luminary students hanging around to wonder where Elodie Devine is going.
Blocky concrete buildings come into view across the street from the grad building’s steep lawn. My steps slow.
Even in my own reality, I haven’t ventured over to Beacon Prep in years. The contrast smacks me in the face.
Fuck if it doesn’t look like a prison.
The four dull gray buildings—elementary, junior, senior, and administrative—stand in a square around their own, much patchier green. The shape is echoed in the small square windows that dot the buildings’ outer walls in strict lines. At least the chain-link fence that surrounds most of the campus is only chest high and free of barbed wire.
If it wasn’t for Mom’s efforts, this is where I’d have spent the last fourteen years of my life.
As many reasons as I have to hate Luminary Academy, no part of me imagines I’d have been better off at Beacon. The nickname Grady used for the place is awful but hardly inaccurate.
Some of the Beacon Prep students will end up in low but relatively safe positions serving more prominent lucents: in clubs like The Eclipse or as secretaries and personal assistants and chauffeurs like Maurice. But most of them will be assigned to squads around North America to tackle the growing void problem.
We’re taught that centuries ago, void creatures were so uncommon that there are no surviving reports. The theory most lucent researchers put forward is that the emergence of voids has something to do with the disappearance of the radiants, possibly influenced by industrialization and modern technology as well.
But no one knows exactly why we now find animals—and occasionally people—completely lacking in ephemera. They contain no life energy, no spirit or soul or whatever you’d want to call it. It leaves them mindless… and hostile in their mindlessness.
