“No, thanks. I’ve had enough Elon Musk fanboys to last me a lifetime.”
“They’re not like that. You’d give them a chance if you saw what they were working on.” It really was groundbreaking stuff. Some of it … a little experimental, but I’d never met another group of people as driven to discover things about Magic, who were so dedicated to mastering their craft. I thought, at last, I’d found my people.
I knew Max would change his mind about them if he met them. So I knocked on his door one morning before a meeting, intent on dragging him to it.
He didn’t come when I knocked, but I could hear him in there, stumbling around. I could already imagine the whiskey smell on his breath. Must have been some night.
He finally came to the door in boxers and no shirt. “You’re not supposed to be in the boy’s hall,” he said, eyes widening. He angled himself in front of the door and made to close it behind him.
I shrugged. “It’s fine, Jamie let me in.” There was a rustling from inside his room. I frowned. “What’s that?”
He moved to close the door behind him, but I reached out my hand. “It’s nothing,” he mumbled. “I’m busy this morning. Rain check?”
More rustling, and a distinct utterance of “shit” from inside.
“There’s someone in there.”
“Cel, this isn’t the best time.” There was a strange look that passed across his face, panic and shock and … guilt?
My voice rose unusually high. “Who’s in there, Max?” I shoved open the door.
A girl, her bottom half covered by sheets, top half only clothed in a bra, tapping the screen on her phone with bright pink nails. I stared at her stupidly, my thoughts sluggish and hazy.
“Did you sleep in here last night?” I asked. For all the books I read, I still said the stupidest fucking things.
But when she looked up, my brain started working again. I recognized the long sweep of black hair across her shoulders, those pretty brown eyes that didn’t miss an inch, and the oh-so-familiar look of disdain. My stomach heaved.
“You—you slept with Luce?”
Max’s eyes darted frantically around the space as if an exit might just appear in the wall.
Luce started gathering up her things, and all I could do was stand there, staring at the book still sitting outside the door. Feeling so stupid for leaving it there the night before, because of course he hadn’t read it. He was fucking Luce, right there in the bed that I’d slept with him in.
I couldn’t take it. Everything was too much, too bright, and Luce was mumbling some bland apologies or excuses, and something about getting off her shirt because I was standing on it.
My footsteps carried me down the hall, until I was all-out sprinting. All I heard at my back was Max, calling my name.
In the blinding days that followed, I fervently ignored my phone. I found a new spot in the library and paid an underclassman to cast an illusion charm so Max wouldn’t find me. I searched for any escape—anything to occupy my mind and keep me from thinking about him and the smell in that room, sticky sweet like body spray and sweat. I found solace in books, in my old routines of obsessive study of Magic.
But now there was a problem. All my methods of casting were with Max. Though I ordered myself to hate him every chance I got, my Magic felt his absence like an aching chill. My fingers itched for him. Magic had always been the only thing that had been there for me, so big it blocked out all other thoughts until I could only see, breathe, and live in the Magic. Now it had been tainted by the person who’d hurt me the most.
So I went to talk to Jamie. They’d been bringing it up casually to me for weeks now, something they’d found in an old book. “It’s just experimental,” they’d said. “Something to advance the science.” And I’d thought about it off and on, but never had the courage to pull the trigger. Until now.
“I want to do it.”
Jamie had told me about this spell that could unbind you from anything that had fractured your soul. As a dimidium, my Magical soul was in two pieces, so it was theoretically a way to no longer be a dimidium. A way to stand on my own two feet, on my own accomplishments, to never need anyone else again.
“You’re sure?” he asked, but Jamie was already beckoning me closer.
“My Magical soul is broken in half, right? Well, let’s put it back together again.”
“It should be … relatively uncomplicated,” Jamie explained. “As a dimidium, you have one foot in the world of Being already. You can access the aura of another person and sense their emotions and power. You can read their Magic almost like the pages of a book. We just have to find the right materials for the unbinding. Unfortunately, the spell is not as detailed as I’d like.”
Over the course of a week, we experimented with all types of materials to get the Magic to unbind from my objects and from Max: glass, cloth, under solar eclipses and full moons, rare minerals, steel, iron, gold, silver, but the thing that seemed to have the greatest potential were bones.
Bones, charred and blackened by fire. It seemed the Magic was readily able to attach to them; the threads flowed straight to it—but only for a moment. Almost like it wanted to jump into a person. But once the Magic found the bones were dead and lifeless, they jumped back into the next living thing, me, and we were back where we started.
For weeks, we worked at it, when finally … It was an ordinary Wednesday, and unbearably hot.
