ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-THREE: Meeting

123     It was four in the morning, and Alden’s fingers were flicking through the new spell. He focused on the shapes his auriad made, pushing himself outward through them in that specific way that made magic happen. Casting excited him, like always, but he wished there was someone around to answer his questions. Following the instructions in Whan-tel’s Art was easy enough. And there were the other factors he could manage on his own–memorization, quick hands, authority manipulation. But can I do things to make the spell work better? Can I do things to make it worse? Different? He was sure the answers were all ‘yes.’ Instructor Gwen-lor’s brief mentions of the “art of perceiving in multiple ways” teased him sometimes. Perception wasn’t just an important tool for Avowed using their skills, as Joe had taught him. It could also help with spell casting. But Alden’s books didn’t tell him how to work with perception or around it or if he was even supposed to be taking it into consideration regularly. Maybe altering your perception came into play only when you were struggling with a spell or if you needed to make it deviate from its intended purpose.   He just didn’t know. And besides that, wizards talked about perfection a lot. According to Lute, and based on Alden’s own experience, perfection made wordchains more likely to land. How did that fit in with spells? Surely a greater or lesser degree of accuracy must effect something. Once or twice, he’d noticed himself making a small mistake, and the spells still did what they were meant to do. Am I learning correctly? Just how much am I missing? A whole culture’s worth of history and insight, obviously. It was so frustrating. He wished he could listen in on Kibby’s lessons again. He withdrew his authority from the effort and completed the last few motions with only his hands and his auriad. He thought he had the spell down well enough for it to have an effect, and he didn’t want to shoot a flying dagger of force at his laptop. The computer was open on the desk beneath his loft bed. Last night, before he went to sleep, Alden had watched televised obstacle course runs for a while. He’d seen them before, but one-on-one runs between famous Avowed were more popular. He wasn’t as familiar with uni team competitions. Having actually experienced a course himself, he found he had a much deeper interest in them and appreciation for how difficult they were. I’m sure I would’ve thought things like tunnels and corridors were boring filler if I’d watched last year, but now they’re so stressful. After his death by tree limb, he’d hated crawling through the pipe more than any other obstacle, even though it was just about the easiest thing to do on the whole course. You were a sitting duck inside that thing—barely enough room to move around, no visibility, completely reliant on your teammates to tell you what was happening and keep both ends of the tube clear so you could emerge safely. Alden lowered his hands and let the auriad wrap itself back around his wrist. Then, he stood from his learning cushion and dropped Wummy on top of it to serve in his usual post as a guard wombat. Cushion already has a loose thread, he noted. That makes it looks kind of sad. Should I try for another hour or two of sleep? He ended up sitting at his desk and forcing his way through some homework instead. Less than an hour later, the quiet murmur of voices lured him from his room. All the lights were off in the apartment except for the kitchenette’s nightlight. Haoyu was sitting at the table with a tablet, stylus, and a lot of candy wrappers. Lexi, dressed for his morning run, was standing across the table from him. “Hey,” Alden said, keeping his voice down for Lute’s sake. “You guys are up already?” “I’m up already,” Lexi replied. “He’s up still.” He jerked his head toward Haoyu. As Haoyu rolled his eyes at the disapproval in his friend’s voice, Alden realized he was still wearing the t-shirt he’d had on when the two of them left North of North last night. “You didn’t sleep?” Alden asked him. “I could tell I wasn’t in a sleeping mood.” “I’ve been up since three. I should’ve come in here with you.” “You both should’ve gone to bed. Your frequent potion therapy sessions aren’t a substitute for actual rest,” Lexi said. Haoyu shoved a few gummy bears into his mouth and chewed them with a stubborn look on his face. Alden walked over to see the tablet. Unsurprisingly, it was playing their footage from gym yesterday. “I’m annoyed we’re only doing it for these two classes while Snake is gone,” Alden admitted. “It’s good practice, just like gym always is. But four runs is barely enough for us to get our bearings. I feel like we’d need to do a lot more work as a team to actually play the game well.” “It is annoying.” Haoyu shoved the tablet away from himself. “If we had a couple of weeks and some practice time, I think it would be really fun. But like this, we’re just getting the awkward starting phase of learning our way through the course. And I felt like such an asshole yesterday trying to give advice when I was in a bad mood and everyone else was too. Did I make Everly cry?” “No,” Alden and Lexi said at the same time. “She was just mad at herself,” said Alden. “She usually casts a lot more in class. I wondered if she wanted to use her spells for some of the obstacles but couldn’t because she was nervous about how it would affect the rest of us.” “I didn’t feel like I was doing enough to help either. And there’s no time before the next class to make plans.” Haoyu held up one finger then another. “Today. Tomorrow. That’s it. Everyone has different class schedules to work around, and I don’t even know if they all want to meet. The instructors didn’t assign group planning sessions, so some people might not care about it. Maybe I should go for a run. It’ll clear my mind, right? That’s something people do to clear their minds?” Lexi tilted his head. “Are you asking me?” “I’ll go, too,” said Alden. Haoyu pushed himself back from the table. “I’ll be ready in a minute.” Alden expected Lexi to protest that his morning ritual was sacred and he didn’t want company or chatter about gym class during it. But he waited for them both. It was dark and chilly, and the run was easy. They followed a winding route around and through the campus. As the sky was growing paler, they found themselves on their third trip through the Celena North memorial garden. The area was lighted by lanterns hanging from the arching tree limbs. “I’m going to stop here for a while,” Alden said as they approached a fork in the walkway. “You guys go ahead.” “Do you want us to pick you up something from the coffee shop?” Haoyu asked. “I’ll grab something on my own.” He slowed, letting them run ahead of him before he turned down the path. He passed the bench where he’d first met Hazel Velra, then he entered the amphitheater. The grass terrace seating, the tall granite memorial stones, the ornamental pear tree—it all looked the same, and yet it felt very different. He walked down to the lowest level to stand beside the stone that had Hannah’s name carved on it. “You know,” he said, reaching out to touch the letters, “I affixed the next day. That sounds insane. If you’d been around, I’m sure you would’ve given me some advice before I leaped headfirst into being an Avowed.” He wondered what she would’ve said. The things you told a kid who admired you were probably different than the things you told someone who was about to sign the Contract and come live this life for real. Boe had made a similar point. It was a good point. Alden wasn’t sure how much it mattered now, after everything. “Or maybe you’d have been exactly the same person with the same things to say. It wouldn’t surprise me. You always seemed to know what you believed in so clearly…. You were the coolest, Hannah. All the superhero fans who didn’t notice you because you chose to work in the background really missed out.” He pressed his finger to the stone harder then pulled it back to see the impression of one of the letter A’s left behind on his skin. “I’ve changed a lot.” When he turned his head, he could see the spot on the first terrace where he’d chosen to sit when he came for the funeral. “There’s this chasm between then and now. And it’s not just those ‘growing up’ changes everyone tells you are coming for you. “Don’t think I’m complaining. I’m not. Not at the moment anyway. I’ve gone through some epic agonizing since I got home two and a half months ago. But I’ve been getting used to caring about different stuff and thinking differently. And it’s not bad. I think this side of the chasm is probably just as good in a different way. I wish we could hang out and talk about it. I hope we’d still be friends.” He left a short while later. The sky was bright. It was going to be a clear day.   ******   “You guys, let’s ask the whole team if they do want to meet up and work out strategy for tomorrow,” Alden said as he entered the apartment later with a takeout container from Cafeteria North in hand. “They might be up for it, and even if it’s only a couple of them and us, that’ll be half the group. I’ve got some thoughts.” “I was just checking with the library!” Haoyu was drinking an iced fruit tea and looking much more like himself than he had earlier. “There are study rooms big enough for the group, but we can only have them for three hours at a time.” “What if we take turns booking them?” Alden asked. “If we could keep one all day, then whenever some of us didn’t have class we could be in there working stuff out. I book one, and then you book it for the end of my time slot, then Lexi, then Jeffy—” Haoyu’s hands moved through the air. “That should work! I don’t see anything saying it won’t on the website. Why Jeffy?” “Because he’s probably already awake. He gets up early. And he seems eager to participate in general.” Lexi came down the hall, buttoning the cuffs of his shirt. “We should strategize, but I don’t see how you two are going to get everyone to agree on everything.” “I doubt we’ll agree on everything,” said Alden, “but there are a couple of things I know would help me run the course better that I can’t imagine any of you disagreeing with. So if we start from there, I think it’ll cool off some tempers and put everyone in a more helpful frame of mind. Can I…lead the beginning of the meeting, I guess?” Haoyu looked curious. “And how mad do you two think Lute will be if I wake him up early?” Alden asked. “He won’t be mad at all,” said Haoyu. “You should do it.” “He’s joking,” Lexi warned. “I’m not. You should do it, Alden. Do it.” “I did bring him waffles from the cart. Hot and fresh.” He held up the takeout container. “That makes up for it, right?” Lute grumbled about being dragged from his bed for an unplanned tutoring session, but Alden didn’t think he was actually annoyed. “You banished Hazel from the planet, so I guess you deserve more of my company.” Alden had been reaching across the table to hand him the food. That made him pause. “I did what?” “Heard it from Roman and the Grandwitch herself yesterday,” said Lute. “According to Roman, Hazel freaked out and ran away to work for our employers in a full-time capacity because she couldn’t take the heat from the video. Aulia’s story is that this is a character rehabilitation retreat. She says Hazel will come back from it more at peace with her skill and rank.” I ran a person off of Earth?   He did not know how to feel about that. Lute took his breakfast from Alden and opened the box. Steam wafted out. He smiled. “The waffles are still crispy. The chocolate curls and the mocha whipped cream aren’t even melted.” “I know,” said Alden. Lute dragged his finger through the whipped cream. “What are you doing with your life, man? Become a delivery person. Put a couple of drones out of business.”   ******   Throughout the morning, the team gradually agreed to meet up. At twelve fifteen, when Conversation IV let out, Alden dashed across campus to the library. He took the stairs up to the sixth-floor study room they’d booked and tried to figure out how to use the projector so that they could have video of their runs from yesterday up on the wall. Everyone who wasn’t here in the room was going to be on call through their interface, except for Astrid. She’d been invited to a special practice session with a visiting Morph mentor.   A short while later, when the rest of the team had all gathered or joined the call, there was an unpleasant thirty seconds of everyone staring at each other before Alden cleared his throat and said, “Just to be clear, I’m not trying to be team captain or something like that. But I figured we needed to start somewhere. Does anyone mind if I direct the conversation for now? I have my last class of the day in an hour, so if someone else wants to take over then that’s great.” [I don’t mind,] Haoyu texted from his current class. “Should you really be the one—” Reinhard started to say. “It sounds great to me,” Maricel interrupted. Reinhard side-eyed her put didn’t protest. “Okay,” said Alden. “Let’s clear the air. Yesterday was less than ideal.” “It was embarrassing,” said Njeri. She was wearing a jacket with the hockey club’s emblem on the back, and she’d brought a big bag of pita chips and jars of dip for her lunch. “We came across as a bunch of incompetent kids,” said Reinhard, drumming his fingers on the conference table. We kind of are, thought Alden. But since almost the entire group was nodding in agreement, he didn’t voice the opinion. “I wanted...