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Tweak says, "I'M BATMAN!!!"

Galadriel "El" Higgins (

elhiggins) wrote in

valloic,
@ 2022-10-09 08:06:00

Chloe Rasmussen and Galadriel Higgins

Backdated to early September| In the forest near the covert

El and Chloe arrive in Vallo (cameos by Will Laurence & Temeraire)

It was truly amazing to see Orion taking out the mals as if it was nothing, and Chloe might have stayed to watch if she wasn’t so eager to go home. And also if mals weren’t super gross, and if she hadn’t done her time in a prison of a school.

Okay, so maybe she wouldn’t have stayed to watch.

She turned to El, making a heart with her hands before she leapt out the gates, and was so, so happy to see her mom and dad for the first time in four years, to hug them and tell them how much she loved them. She’d even opened her mouth to call to them, but the words died on her lips.

Her mom and dad weren’t there. No one was there. Just trees around her, and grass underneath her feet, and birdsong in the air, and none of that was right, either, because she was supposed to have been sent back to the New York enclave which was, most decidedly, indoors.

“Mom?” she called, tentatively, and then a little louder, “Dad?” And then she had to hold her hands over her mouth to stop her from yelling for them: yelling, she’d learned, was an invitation to invite a mal for dinner. She reached for mana instinctively, thinking maybe she could cast some sort of detection spell to find them or… or Magnus, or anyone else who was supposed to be there with her and very clearly was not. But of course, there was none anymore – induction would have stripped her of any mana she might have had gathered, which wouldn’t have been a big deal if she was back home, where she could join onto the New York Enclaves powersharer, and would have been safe besides, but something had obviously gone very wrong with the induction spell, and she had no idea where she was, or if she was safe or anything.

She needed a weapon, anything, and she cast her gaze about until she found a branch, about as thick as a baseball bat if not longer, and grabbed it, her fingers closing around the rough bark.

The breeze caressed her face, gently and scented with greenery and saltwater – there was an ocean nearby, apparently – and Chloe lost it entirely. The breeze that occasionally wafted from the gym El had fixed on Field Day after being trapped in the void for four long years, but it was nothing, nothing compared to the real thing, and she collapsed, crying with her eyes open, branch clutched firmly in her fingers.

—

Orion shoved El through the gate. She reached to try and grab his arm, her mouth stuck half open on a horrified protest - too late - she stumbled and fell, and with no chance to even try to catch herself she landed hard on her back with a blow that forced all the air out of her lungs. Gasping, her body took over, rolling her onto her knees so that she could struggle up to one foot, hands up and ready to blast apart any stray maleficaria that might have been lured to her - the very last - induction portal, unable to get through until she opened it. Nothing attacked her. She was kneeling on grass growing out of real, soft earth, and the sun was very bright so that it was overwhelming, and as her horrified, devastated mind eventually caught up to what was happening, she had to fight the very real urge to let herself fall again. She had done it. She had saved every single student in the Scholomance... all but one.

She wanted to cry. She wanted to wail and shriek and sob into her knees. She put a hand to her chest, for the hope of some comfort, but the bandolier cup was gone, and so was the harness she had been wearing that strapped the Golden Sutras to her back. She stared down at herself in disbelief. She’d lost Precious, and she didn’t understand how.

She got up, allowing out of self-preservation her anger to overcome her grief, forcing back the memory of Orion’s stupid, gormless smile as he laughed and leapt forth into the void. She spun around, as though expecting the gate to still be there, ready to give the non-existent school another blast of super volcano for good measure. But there was just trees on a hill, the distant sound and smell of the sea, and she couldn’t have done the super volcano spell even if she wanted to because she realised in the next moment that she felt completely and utterly empty for the first time in months, since she had first put on the power-sharer. There was no mana pouring out of the thing now, because Orion had been the one filling the pool over and over, and Orion was gone.

She ripped the power sharer off her wrist, threw it as far as she could - not very far, it turned out, as all her limbs felt like they were made of cooked spaghetti - and screamed so loud that a bird took off from a nearby tree with a squawk and a rush of wings. She didn’t care if it brought every last living mal from the vicinity running in her direction. It was a scream she’d been holding in for the last three minutes - three minutes ago she had been inside a Mawmouth - willingly - by CHOICE. But into it went not just the pent up horror of that experience but also the fear and pain and frustration of the last four years, the constant daily struggle to stay alive at the expense of others, the manic pressure of the last few weeks, the knowledge that it was on her to get everyone out, and that last, awful realisation that they had done it, that against all odds the stupid plan had actually worked, and then the boy who just yesterday had told her that she was the only right thing he had ever wanted, that he wanted to come to Wales and be with her forever travelling the world and building safe places for future generations to live, who had finally convinced her that she could be something other than a pariah in the world, had decided she wasn’t worth the effort after all, and actually he would rather die in the void destroying maleficaria for all eternity.

Only when she finished screaming did she remember that she was out. She was back in the real world at last. “Mum?” she croaked out, stupidly, because if Gwen had been standing there she would definitely have noticed by now, and turned around again, and again, just in case. She didn’t know where she was, didn’t recognise the landscape, but she supposed she might be within a few miles of the commune. She was disoriented, and the stupid portal had apparently dumped her somewhere on the coast, which meant at least a five hour walk. One last inconvenience - thanks, Scholomance. It was certainly better than a sewer, but she didn’t have the energy to appreciate it; if she thought too much about how fresh the air tasted, about how those were real birds singing, not mals masquerading as birds (probably), she was going to lose it again, and she had not fought her way through four years and pied-pipered a billion mals into the graduation hall only to be taken by surprise and eaten five seconds after getting out.

She had nothing but Orion’s t-shirt (almost all of the glitter long-since rubbed off), her boots, and her giant cargo pants held together by a string belt. Maybe a sewer would have been better, because she could have followed it to a street, and then she’d at least know what direction to start walking in. The best she could do was start moving and hope that she could find a road, a car, someone to borrow a phone from or perhaps get a lift - she seriously doubted anyone was going to pick up a brown girl dressed in rags on the side of the road, let alone one who gave off the vibe that she wanted to (and could) set the car on fire, but at least someone might give her directions if only to get rid of her. She took a deep, harsh breath, and, still feeling like she was holding herself together one second at a time, started stomping off through the grass away from the smell of the sea.

Chloe hadn’t survived four years in the Scholomance by running toward screaming. She wasn’t Orion, who would have been off like a shot as soon as he’d heard anything resembling something like someone in distress. She, generally, would keep her nose to whatever she was doing, or, if it sounded bad enough, would turn and go in the other direction.

Except in this case, the screaming didn’t sound like someone getting slowly devoured by something. It sounded angry. And it sounded, a little, like El. It was hard to tell who was screaming when there was screaming happening, but if she had to guess, that’s who she would have gone with.

She rubbed her face in the crook of her elbow and climbed to her feet, and then, holding the branch in front of her like a sword, she crept, carefully, toward the screaming, and then paused when she heard something coming toward her and she paused, mentally running through a list of spells – she might not have had any mana in her powersharer, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t cheat a little, use some ambient malia to cast something that didn’t require much power but would still be useful against a mal – and then she almost sobbed in relief again when she saw El come crashing through the underbrush.

“El!” she cried, nearly sobbing again. “Oh thank god, it is you. Something must have gone seriously wrong with the graduation spell.” It was supposed to have dropped them on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, after all. “Do you know where we are? Is Orion with you?”

El stopped and stared blankly at Chloe as she came running up, armed ridiculously with a big stick. Chloe was not supposed to be here, wherever here was. She was meant to be in New York. And then the mention of Orion made her bite her lip, hard to keep from letting out the desperate sobs she was only just keeping at bay. Orion also ought to have been in New York. If he’d had any bloody stupid sense.

She looked around a little wildly, growing more and more suspicious of her surroundings. Something was wrong about the trees, and the smell of the air. She was no botanical expert, or anything, but it didn’t feel like home. She had thought it was only the strangeness of being out in the world, finally, but… “I… don’t know,” she said at last, with all the weariness of someone who had been pouring oceans of magic through their body non-stop for the last fifteen minutes. Her voice came out all stiff and croaky, the effects of Chloe’s soothing potion having either worn off or been unable to stand up against the ferocity of her screaming. “But when does anything ever work out the way it’s supposed to?” she added, with dangerous flatness. She crossed her arms, shivering; there was a breeze, and it was cold against her bare skin. “I don’t suppose you have anything at all left for a location spell?”

Chloe… did not like the look that crossed El’s face at the mention of Orion – had he not made it out? She’d never known him to flag in the face of a mal, but with as massive as they wave of them had been when she’d left the Scholomance, it wouldn’t have taken much. Tripping over one of the bodies he’d left in his wake, slipping, even just having something sneak up behind him. It wouldn’t have been hard, with how many there were.

She wouldn’t ask about it, not right now.

“I don’t have anything left,” Chloe said. “But I can cheat a little. I know a cheap location spell that won’t take much?” It wouldn’t do them much good in terms of telling them where they were within a mile or two of a landmark that one of them recognized, but it should, at least, be able to point them toward the nearest road.

El tried but didn’t quite manage to resist rolling her eyes towards the sky. It was a nice sky, very blue and very high up, and so disturbing that she had to shake herself a little. She and Chloe had gotten along much better since becoming allies, but there were limits to her patience, and she’d reached them the moment Orion had shot her that stupid smile and told her he loved her only to prove the very opposite in the next second. “Only an enclaver would go straight to cheating the instant they don’t have access to practically unlimited power,” she snapped. “If you want to risk it that’s your lookout, but since we are currently breathing, not even injured, and it seems to be a nice day with no shadows for mals to even lurk in, I’m not sure this constitutes an actual emergency just yet.”

They might still be in Wales. They might. It didn’t make any sense why Chloe was there, but maybe the wrong portal had opened, or something. Maybe her Mum was going to appear any minute now and tell them that everything was okay. “Besides, you’ve got your very big stick,” she added, unable to help a healthy dose of sarcasm. “If we walk long enough in the same direction there’ll probably be a path or a sign, or something. And if we run,” she added, with no enthusiasm whatsoever, “we might actually be able to build some mana to scrape together your location spell.” El didn’t have so much as an expensive location spell, of course, because that was something that might actually be useful. It was almost a good thing she was out of mana, because the frustration she felt might have actually been enough to spark a forest fire in that moment.

Chloe was used to El right now, knew that even if she was rude she wasn't necessarily to trying to be hurtful, but Chloe's emotions were still raw and she found herself blinking back tears. Nothing El had said warranted tears, and yet here she was.

"Everyone cheats sometimes, El," Chloe said, and bit back unless they're a step away from being the most powerful maleficer we've ever seen because El was honestly one of the best people Chloe had ever met – no one else would have put themself on the line like El had, not even Chloe, and they were both upset right now. Chloe could do her part to not make things worse. She took a deep breath. "But you're right. I should save that for an emergency."

She hesitated a little, gripping her stick which probably would be entirely useless if a mal jumped out of nowhere, except that Chloe knew an quick and easy incendiary spell that would turn it into a burning stick if she needed it to be, and that might not be quite as useless. "Do you… do you think we should run?" Chloe asked, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth and looking at the trees. A mal very well could jump out at them from behind one and then they'd just run right into its open jaws. They probably hadn’t gotten all the mals in the world packed into the school.

El tried to pull herself together. She couldn’t seem to think clearly, as though whatever fine edge she’d put on her brain over the last four years had gone dull on her return to the real world, but she knew it was exhaustion. If it was just her, she might have found a sheltered place and burrowed in for a few hours, consequences be damned, but it wasn’t just her. “I don’t think we need to,” she said, looking over her shoulder again just in case. “If there was anything about it would probably have jumped us by now.” And, even though she knew better, there was something about the place… it seemed quite impossible that anything horrible could be lurking somewhere so nice and clean and bright… On the other hand, she might very well have alerted something further away to their location by her screaming - oops, too bad - so maybe it was best to clear the immediate area sooner rather than later. “Let’s just… walk fast,” she said finally. She didn’t know how long she could keep up a run, anyway, and she might need her flagging energy later if things took a bad turn.

They took off, each keeping an eye out to their own side of the path they walked. It was easier in some places than others; not exactly a straight line, when they had to go around trees and over small hills and through thickets. El sung the most complicated songs she knew under her breath while walking, which actually started to build a little mana, not really enough to use, but something, and she braced herself to have to use it anyway at the first sign of trouble. But her prediction seemed true, there didn’t seem to be much more than regular wildlife in this inexplicable forest. At one point she thought she sensed the presence of something huge overhead, but when she looked up there were only thick, darkening clouds moving quickly along. On the bright side, if it started to storm maybe she could call some lightning. She’d never done it before, but she’d read a book about how to catch it, and there was loads of mana in lightning. Of course, she’d probably die, but what else was new?

“Do you… have Mistoffolees?” she asked at one point, between songs, as the thought finally occurred to her. “I must have lost Precious… coming out, somehow.”

Walking fast Chloe could do. She could, as a bonus, do it by lifting her legs higher than strictly necessary, all while carrying her heavy stick. She wasn’t in awful shape, especially not since she’d had to start building mana during the last of the school year once Orion had run out of mal to hunt, but she wasn’t used to long periods of extended exercise, especially not on uneven, occasionally overgrown terrain, and it didn’t take long until she was sweating. She thought she had enough mana for the location spell, but not the location spell and any sort of offensive or defensive spell, so she thought she should probably keep going a little longer before she suggested that they use it.

She was just about to comment about how nice it was, getting to walk under the actual sun again, and how she was absolutely going to need to get some sunscreen asap because four years without the real sun, only the sunlights in the cafeteria, meant that she was probably going to immediately burn, when El asked her about Mistoffelees.

“Yes, of course I do,” Chloe said, confused, hand going to her bandolier. She’d been grabbing it, off and on, as they walked, but hadn’t wanted to take him out until she knew they were safe.

Except, now that she thought about it, he’d been awfully quiet. She hesitated, then opened the bandolier cup just to be sure, and her heart dropped to her stomach when she realized it was empty, and stopped in her tracks, staring at it.

“Wait,” she said to to El. “He must have gotten out.” And then she turned. “Mistoffelees?!” she called.

—-

El had indeed alerted something further away to their location by her screaming, and while Chloe didn’t make a habit of running toward screaming, Laurence absolutely did.

He was glad that there’d been plenty of healers at the wedding, and so that by the time he made it back to the covert afterward, he’d been nearly ship-shape. His uniform had seen better days, and he’d had to tell Temeraire about the attack, but he’d been able to downplay his own injuries so that while Temeraire had been cautious and a little overprotective again, it was nowhere near the levels it had been once he’d returned from the sphere.

And so when he’d heard the scream, sometime in the lull of construction on Temeraire’s pavilion, he’d managed, more or less, to convince Temeraire that he should go find it on his own. It had sounded like a scream of frustration, not of distress, he’d assured the dragon, and Temeraire would have difficulties in the forest, as large as he was, not to mention if it was a new arrival, as Laurence suspected – he wasn’t on patrol today, so he’d not received a ping for any new arrivals, but it seemed likely – then there was a greater than average chance that meeting Temeraire off the hop, before anyone had a chance to explain that he was friendly, would likely cause more harm than good.

Temeraire had, reluctantly, agreed, so long as he could first make a sweep of the forest to make sure it seemed relatively safe, and Laurence had waited with as much patience as he could muster, and when Temeraire came back, deeming the forest as safe as it ever was - “although I stayed very far aloft, so as not to startle anyone, so it was difficult to see very much,” - then Laurence headed out.

Of course, whoever it was who had done the screaming had moved well on by the time Laurence got where they’d been – or where, he assumed they’d been, having left some sort of strange bracelet in the brush, which he gathered.

He did not have Tharkay’s skill with tracking, but whoever it was who’d arrived had taken no great pains hiding which direction their direction, and so Laurence followed in that direction, hoping he was going the right way.

And then, from somewhere in the distance, he heard someone call “Mist–” and the tone shifted to nearly immediately to his left “--offelees?” and he offered up a silent thanks that the forest had, for once, shifted in a way that was beneficial.

He only had a few feet of brush to cross through before he spotted the two girls.

El was regretting asking almost right away; she ought to have waited until they were somewhere safe enough to panic, a panic which she could understand. Her grief over the loss of Precious was going to hit her later, she knew, she was only holding it at bay for now until it wasn’t stupid to let herself feel it. “Chloe,” she hissed, wondering how she was going to talk the girl out of searching the whole forest, but as she turned she saw something coming. Instinct brought her hands up, the words for the charming organ desiccation spell on the tip of her tongue, all in the same second that her brain started yelling human, human! Abort, abort!

She bit her lip so hard it bled with the effort of swallowing the spell. “Over here!” she called out instead, waving, her voice wavering and breaking awkwardly; she coughed. Fortunately the stranger seemed to be coming in their direction, and he looked older - no chance it was another wayward student from the Scholomance. She didn’t know how she would have dealt with that. She caught Chloe by the arm before she could run off into the trees after her mouse, which El wished she didn’t know she would never find. “Chloe, look, there’s someone…”

Some part of Chloe knew better, even if she wasn't willing to admit it. She knew, from the way that El asked the question, that Precious hadn't made it out the other end of the spell at all. She knew that the cup on her bandolier had been shut firmly. And most importantly, she knew that Mistoffelees wasn't a regular mouse. He wouldn't have just run off, not without telling her, and if he had, he would have come to her as soon as she had called him. But the alternative – that, what, the school had decided to eat him for the of sending her… not even home, but to wherever in the world she was was too awful to contemplate.

Luckily, she didn't have to contemplate it long, because El was grabbing her and telling her to look, and Chloe very nearly started crying again, because there, standing in front of her, was the first adult she'd seen in four years and suddenly she was very certain that she could stop worrying. The adults could figure out what went wrong, and they could set everything to rights. Assuming he was a wizard, at least.

He offered them a smile, and held up his hands in a non-threatening way, though now Chloe was actually looking at him, and there was something not right. Some combination of his suit, which was a modern cut, but worked naturally enough with the neckcloth that he was wearing that at first, she hadn't thought there was anything off about it at all. At his hip, he wore both a sword, the hilt shaped like a dragon, and a pistol. And while it wasn't entirely uncommon for men to wear their hair long and tied back, combined with everything – except for the suit – else it gave him an almost old-fashioned feel.

She didn't know what it meant, but honestly, all of this was getting to be too much. She just wanted to go home, but she mentally prepared a shielding spell that would cover her and El if he looked to reach for either of his weapons.

"Good afternoon," he said, gently – English, so maybe she had somehow ended up somewhere in the UK. "Have you two only just arrived?"

Or not.

"Um?" Chloe answered.

El sighed. Of course the first person they came across in the middle of nowhere would be a total weirdo on his way to some kind of ancient weapons festival. And the one time a naturally friendly blonde American girl would actually be useful, for interacting with strangers who would almost certainly treat El with the utmost suspicion, and Chloe couldn’t manage to string two words together. Fantastic.

“We’re a bit lost actually,” she said, nudging Chloe harder than was strictly necessary in the ribs with her elbow. “I don’t suppose you could tell us if we’re anywhere near the Radiant Mind commune?”

Chloe grunted, and shot El a glare, but she got what El meant. Before she had a chance to add on, though, the man shook his head.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “My name’s Will Laurence.” He shot them each a look as if making some sort of assessment, and then, apparently having come to some conclusion continued on with with the strangest story she’d ever heard, about being in a land called Vallo, and how they’d apparently been brought here by mysterious, unknowable forces, but if they’d just come with him he could fix them with a cup of tea and have someone from the Department of Outlander Affairs come gather them.

Chloe stared, and then cleared her throat. “Um, no? That’s okay, but thanks for the offer?” she said, because if there was one thing she was absolutely certain about, it was that she probably shouldn’t go wandering off with strange men who found them in the middle of the woods. “Maybe we could just use your phone instead? If you have one?”

Laurence nodded, reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket – Chloe tensed; just because he was wearing weapons on his hip didn’t mean he wasn’t also carrying them – but he just pulled out a smartphone and came forward to offer it to them. Chloe very gently pushed El on the shoulder; if they were in the UK – they definitely weren’t in New York – then it made more sense for El to try calling her mom than for Chloe to try calling her parents.

“Don’t look at me,” El muttered, still giving the side-eye to the obviously crazy man with a gun. “I don’t know any numbers - hang on -” she dug in her pocket for the scrap of paper with Liu and Aadya’s (and Chloe’s, much good that would do) phone numbers on it. That meant calling internationally; sorry, Mr Laurence, if that is in fact the name they call you in the asylum.

A way-too cheery automated voice said, The number you have called cannot be connected. Your plan does not support extra-dimensional calls. Please check the number and try again.

With each failed attempt, El felt her resolve sagging, what little was left. She was on her feet by the force of pure will by this point, and her hands were starting to shake. “I give up,” she said, furiously, shoving the mobile into Chloe’s hands. “You try.” She turned her glare onto the stranger instead. “Please tell me you’re just full of shit,” she said flatly.

Laurence’s lips tightened, a little, at the profanity as the second girl took the phone and began dialling numbers, but his eyes softened a little.

“I’d not lie to you,” he said, though he hardly expected her to believe him. Both of the girls had a furtive look about their eyes and a certain gauntness to their faces that suggested they’d not had an easy time of it lately, but this one especially. “I’ve just reached my first year here myself. Are the two of you from the same world?”

The blonde girl had stopped dialling numbers, apparently, or, at least, she’d stopped bringing the phone to her ear. He wondered if he should stop whatever it was she was doing, but, after a moment, decided there was no harm in it. He suspected that there was little chance of her going through his private photos, given the circumstances, and it was likely better for her to get this out of her system if it meant that she might come around to the idea sooner.

Same world. El thought wearily that she could probably make a point about how she certainly didn’t come from the same world as Chloe Rasmussen, but she was too tired, and it would be lost on this mundane random anyway. “We were in the same place, if that’s what you mean,” she said. “Let me get this straight, you’re saying we’re in another universe outside of space and time? And there’s no way to get back? And you’ve been here a whole year?”

Mum, she thought, what was left of her heart cracking at the edges. Places outside of the real world were not exactly a new concept to students of the Scholomance - or enclavers, for that matter - but at least at the school they had known there was a hard out date. And they had reached it, and they were supposed to be home.

“Yes, that’s right. There are others who’ve been here even longer. But they’ll be able to give you a better explanation at the DOA.” He paused, and then, tone softening, added, “I know it seems grim now, but –”

“If this is some other dimension,” Chloe interrupted, holding the phone out. “Then why do you have Google? And Channing Tatum?”

Laurence didn’t have the slightest idea who that was, but that was a feeling he’d rather grown used to over the last year. “I’m afraid I can’t give any sort of satisfactory answer regarding that,” Laurence said, grimacing. “But this world is a nexus between worlds, and many things – books, movies, television shows – they all bleed over here. There might be someone else who can answer the question better though; my world didn’t have technology like this, and I’m afraid I’m still rather behind.”

El wanted to scream again. First Orion, then Precious, and now she was stuck in another dimension? It didn’t matter that, assuming the explanation was correct, no one would notice that they were gone. She would know. No way back? Fuck that. Time was just space from another angle, and she could rip holes in space as easily as paper. At least, she could when she didn’t feel like a rag that had been soaked in sewer water and wrung out. She pulled Chloe by the arm out of Laurence’s hearing distance. “Maybe we should go with him,” she whispered. “For now. At least we probably won’t be jumped by mals with a mundane around.”

Chloe frowned, glancing back at the man. He didn’t give off serial killer vibes, but then, neither did Jack Westing. And El sort of kind of did, not that Chloe would ever actually say anything, so it turned out that Chloe wasn’t so great at sensing people’s vibes after all.

And El kind of was. Orion had told her that El had known about Jack from way before, after all.

“I think I’ve got enough mana built up for a shielding spell,” Chloe said after a moment. “Or an offensive spell, but I don’t have a lot of good offensive spells.” Why would she need one, when Orion had always been around? She did have her stick though, which wouldn’t do much good against a mal, but would probably do okay if this against most other threats.

“Okay,” Chloe agreed. “Yeah, that sounds good. It’s not like we have many other options, right?” She shot El a smile, one more confident than she felt. All she had wanted to do was see her parents, and maybe take a nice long soak in a bathtub that probably didn’t have amphisbaena hiding in the drains.

But she hesitated before they went back. She hadn’t wanted to say anything with everything else going on, but… “Did the school eat your power sharer too?” she asked, hesitantly.

El looked down dimly at her bare arm and grimaced. “No, I… tossed it,” she said, remembering belatedly that it didn’t exactly belong to her. “Sorry. I was mad. I’ll go back and find it… at some point.” She neglected to mention that the school had apparently kept her precious sutras, because she didn’t want to start a conversation about what else it had kept.

El looked down dimly at her bare arm and grimaced. “No, I… tossed it,” she said, remembering belatedly that it didn’t exactly belong to her. “Sorry. I was mad. I’ll go back and find it… at some point.” She neglected to mention that the school had apparently kept her precious sutras, because she didn’t want to start a conversation about what else it had kept.

Chloe nodded. “We can do a finding spell later,” she promised. There wouldn’t be much mana to share if it was only the two of them, especially with how much mana so many of El’s spells took, but she’d feel better once she knew that El could protect them. In the meantime, she could still give her mana to El if there was any need for it, even if some of it would be lost in the transfer.

Then, she shot Laurence a friendly smile. “Okay, we’ll go with you,” she said. “It’ll be nice to get out of this forest.”

Laurence smiled back, and then looked at the skyline. He knew the forest had shifted recently, but at least the covert always remained in place, and it didn’t take him long to get his bearings – they had shifted, after all, but the covert wouldn’t be very far off.

“I’m afraid I haven’t caught your names just yet,” he said.

“Oh, I’m Chloe Rasmussen,” Chloe said. “And this is El Higgins.”

Laurence smiled at them both. “A pleasure, really. Do you girls have dragons in your world?”

What a question. El blinked, feeling as though she’d seriously missed something. “Dragons?” She exchanged glances with Chloe, wondering where this was going. “Well… there used to be? I think they got mostly all killed for their scales and hearts and things.” Whatever Aadhya would do with dragon scales would probably be incredible, but dragons weren’t mals. Just bursting with mana. There were occasional rumours of small ones hiding in the most inhospitable places on earth, inconvenient for maleficers to track to them down, but nothing had been seen of the giant, ancient creatures for centuries.

Laurence wasn’t quite able to keep his expression from darkening, lips tightening. Dragons, it seemed, lived in all manner of words, and yet somehow, Laurence’s own world seemed the best for them, despite the inequities they faced. It seemed they were either mindless beasts, or hunted to near – or actual – extinction, or all manner of other hogwash.

“You would do well not to mention that to Temeraire, when you meet him,” he said after a moment, not because he thought Temeraire would act out over it, but he didn’t wish to see his ruff droop over something he could do nothing about. “And you don’t need to be afraid; I know he’s a lot to take in, for anyone who’s not used to dragons, but I can promise you that he’s very courteous.”

Chloe shot another look at El as he spoke, and, dropping her voice down low, hopefully low enough that Laurence couldn’t hear, asked, “Does it sound like he’s talking about introducing us to a dragon to you, or am I losing it?”

She probably could have held her question for another moment though. The sound came first: hammers and saws, the sounds of construction being done, and then they rounded a bend in the forest, and the landscape suddenly and abruptly changed. There were still trees, here and there, but it was largely open, grassy knolls like something from a Scottish tourist brochure, a large lake that sat behind a building.

And a large black dragon overseeing a bunch of people who seemed to be putting together some sort of large building. It was easily the biggest living creature Chloe had ever seen or heard about – it looked like it could have eaten a whale in just a few bites – and she stopped in her tracks, hand automatically reaching out to grab El’s forearm.

There wasn’t much that could have distracted El from her growing despair and fury at the situation in that moment, but a dragon the size of a passenger plane was a serious contender. She couldn’t even blame Chloe for being frightened. An hour ago, when she’d had oceans of mana pouring into her from the power-sharer, she could have taken out a beast that size any number of ways - she knew a spell that had been used specifically to disintegrate dragons in the past, and she had a good track record with organ desiccation. But in this state she might as well be an ant for that thing to step on.

As they came out of the trees the black dragon raised its head to look over at them with some interest, although El noticed that it paid the most attention to their guide, the man, its… owner? It seemed satisfied, at least, sitting back on its haunches and crouching a little as though trying to appear less intimidating than a creature twelve times the size of a fully-grown Argonet. “Hello,” it said, out of its actual mouth, deep and rumbling with the edge of something El’s affinity recognised immediately as destructive in some way, as though if it were to speak a little louder it might burst her eardrums. “I am Temeraire. Welcome to Vallo. May we offer you some tea?”

El’s knees went out from under her at that point. No mal was going to come within six miles of that creature. They were safe - for now - and with that realisation whatever survival instinct was keeping her upright finally evaporated.

Chloe let out a cry as El went down, dropping down to kneel beside her and put her hands comfortingly on her shoulder, and it was that cry that attracted Laurence’s attention so that he turned back toward him.

He turned once more toward Temeraire, “Yes, if you could put on some water, please, my dear,” and came back a few steps toward the girls. He wore a look of guilt, and there was a moment’s hesitation before he knelt down beside them.

“My deepest apologies, I should have prepared you better for him,” he said. “But I promise he won’t harm you. He’s really quite gentle when he means to be, and I’m very sure he’d be eager to meet you both. But if you’d prefer, we can wait indoors for someone from the DOA to come, though if you want I might accompany you myself and we can leave forthwith.”

He didn’t wish to, exactly – there was still so much to be done, and he’d much rather oversee the builders himself, but he felt suddenly certain that he’d made a pigs ear of this whole situation; he ought to have known better, just from seeing them, that the girls hadn’t needed a shock like this one.

“I’m fine,” El muttered, even though she very obviously was not; this was slightly less mortifying than when Louisa had had to save her from limping down the hall after curfew because of a head injury she had caused, but only slightly. “Just…. tired.”

The man might as well believe she was frightened; very few people in their right mind wouldn’t be, under the circumstances, but in fact the opposite was true. El wouldn’t have minded a closer look at the dragon, actually, but he had already lurched off, his weight making the ground under them tremble ever so slightly. Cups of tea appeared in the hands of some of the construction crew, and El accepted hers without getting up, leaning heavily against Chloe’s shoulder and ignoring the dewy grass that was starting to soak through her cargos. It was sinking in little by little that this was real, not some kind of joke, or insanity, or a fever dream brought on by trauma, which always seemed like a semi-realistic scenario. “Are you okay?” she asked Chloe once she had caught her breath again and taken a couple of sips of astonishingly real, hot tea.

Chloe didn’t know what she was. It was as if all of this hadn’t had a chance to quite sink in yet. She was aware of what was going on, but it felt as though it was all happening underwater. Part of her was sure she should be afraid of the massive dragon – part of her was afraid of the massive dragon. She was pretty sure that it could swallow her whole and only experience the vaguest of tickles as she went plummeting down its throat, but the tea in her hands was hot and it seemed unexpectedly friendly, and El was warm and steady at her shoulder – even if she probably couldn’t cast anything especially impressive right now, El was still a comfort to have.

“Yeah,” she said, because it was really the only answer she had. “Yeah, yeah, I’m okay.”

Laurence didn’t look any less worried though, and after a moment he asked, as though the question was causing some pain to his sense of manners, “Would you like me to bring you to the table?”

El wasn’t sure that if she got up she wouldn’t just pass out, or possibly just burst into tears. “All right, keep your hat on,” she muttered, with a tone of irritation that their guide probably didn’t deserve, but she was past caring, really. Her pain felt like it was hiding under a thin silk scarf, and the second it was twitched aside just a little, it would overwhelm her at last, and then she would be no good to anyone. Her loss was a psychic class mal hovering over her shoulder, waiting to bite. She took a deep breath anyway and let Chloe help her up, staggering a little.

Chloe quickly stepped in to wrap her arm around El’s waist, making sure not to spill her hot tea over her, and Laurence watched them both, concerned.

There was a table set on the flagstones, a small dinner table, and that was where Laurence led them. When she made it there, Chloe sat down hard in one of the chairs.

She knew she was staring, knew she probably shouldn’t, but she couldn’t help herself. “So you’re… Temeraire?” she ventured after a moment. “Did you make the tea yourself?”

“Oh yes,” the dragon said, apparently pleased. There was a large cauldron-like contraption set up nearby, bubbling gently. He lowered his head to get a proper look at them, sniffing gently - or as gently as a dragon that size could manage. It raised the hairs up on El’s arms and she had to do her best not to start giggling hysterically, which might actually be worse than tears. The dragon was giving her a look as if she smelled off, which wasn’t in the least surprising. Even if she hadn’t just murdered her way through a Maw-Mouth about an hour ago, people always thought El was ‘off’. “Is your friend quite well?” the dragon asked.

“I am fine,” El insisted, louder than she had meant to. She gulped down the rest of her tea and banged the cup down on the table. “What do we do now?” she demanded, looking up at Laurence. “I wouldn’t mind a shower, if we get to pick.”

Chloe liked animals. She especially liked big dogs, the kind of big furry brutes that towered head and shoulders above her when they stood on their hindlegs, and could knock her over easily if they ever wanted to. She knew that the best thing to do with big wild animals was to sit still and let them get used to you instead of making some sort of threatening or sudden movements.

Movements like running away.

“Oh, I think she’s just tired. We had a big day,” Chloe said, and then swallowed; her voice was higher and squeakier than she would have liked it to be. This dragon was clearly not a wild animal, she told herself, over and over again. He seemed friendly and curious and intelligent, and he spoke perfectly good English.

In fact, now that she’d had a second to adjust to his nearness, she kind of wanted to reach out and touch him.

“I should do proper introductions, I think,” Laurence said. “Temeraire, this is Miss Higgens and Miss Rasmussen; they’ve only just arrived. Ladies, this is Temeraire, my dragon companion.”

To El, “If you’d like one, you’re welcome to it,” he said after a moment. “Though you’ll be given an apartment once you see the DOA, if you’d be more comfortable showering in your private quarters. I had thought, if you girls are hungry, that I might bring some snacks while we wait for someone who’s on patrol today to come gather you? I believe Mr. Rutherford is on shift today,” if only because Cullen was on shift nearly every day since Dorian had disappeared.

El’s stomach rumbled. She was hungry, and also covered in MawMouth goo and sweat. Discomfort all over that barely scratched the surface of her overall feelings. She was not emotionally prepared to be in an alternate dimension, or be introduced to dragon people, or to be offered an apartment as though what was happening was in any way even semi-permanent. “Okay,” she said, since no other options immediately presented themselves, and then tugged on Chloe’s sleeve to get her attention once the man had moved away. “I need to talk to you,” she muttered.

Chloe nodded, and looked around. They could, of course, move away from where they were, but Chloe was exhausted. Now that she was sitting down, the weight of everything – of graduation, of finally being out, of not being home and of Mistoffelees’ disappearance and the smell of grass and the feel of the wind on her face – was crushing, and short of a mal attack, Chloe didn’t think she could get up again.

Besides, the table was set in such a nice spot, with wide open spaces all around them, and no chance of anything sneaking up on them or jumping out from behind trees or a wall. So she turned to the dragon and shot him a smile. “Temeraire, do you mind if El and I have a conversation? In private?” she asked sweetly, with all the confidence in the world that yes, of course the dragon would fly off somewhere out of earshot.

Temeraire had been looking down at them curiously, a little surprised at the dark-haired one’s rudeness considering Laurence had gone to all the trouble of searching the forest to find them, but he was as usual a paragon of manners. “Oh, certainly,” he said. “Only let someone know if you need anything,” and turned away to supervise the continuing construction, far enough away to be out of earshot.

El rubbed her tired eyes and glared down at the table. “Listen, I don’t know if any of this is really real,” she said eventually, “but if we go along with it until we can… build enough mana, I promise I’ll figure out a way to get home.” She swallowed. “Maybe the mice just didn’t come through with us and they’re back where we were meant to be. And the sutras. It doesn’t make sense that they could have gotten lost somehow just going through the portal.” Her voice cracked a little on the last word.

Chloe nodded. El might have been right. Chloe wanted her to be right. Only, she kept thinking of how the portal ate up whatever mana people had on them as a toll, and that they’d sent a lot of people home for graduation. More than the school had ever known. Maybe the mice had had enough mana in them that the portal had taken them as a toll.

But no. Maybe they made it back home, safe and sound. Laurence had mentioned something about there being another version of them back home, but Chloe suddenly had the mental image of her parents waiting for her and getting a strange mouse instead, and she nearly started crying again. Maybe Mistofelees would be able to somehow explain what happened, except Mistofelees wouldn’t know what had happened either.

“You’re probably right,” Chloe said. And then, “The sutras are gone too?”

El nodded, and then she had to stuff the back of her fist in her mouth to ward off a wave of emotion. Blast the sutras, as much as she valued them she’d have swapped them in a second for another chance. Another dive into the void, another journey in and out of the Scholomance, preferably with enough mana to get out again, but even without it….

“That’s not all,” she said, breathlessly, when she thought she might be able to keep control. “Chloe… I’m sorry… I lost Orion.”

Chloe had thought that nothing short of a mal attack could get her up out of this seat – and maybe not even then, since she doubted very much that Temeraire or Laurence would have let anything happen to her and El – but seeing El lose control like that had Chloe out of her seat and at Chloe’s side in an instant. She wrapped her arms around her.

“You lost him?” Chloe asked, for a minute confused. If he hadn’t winded up in this place, in Vallo with the two of them, then surely he’d gone right back to New York where everyone else was.

But, of course, that wasn’t what El meant, and it didn’t take Chloe long to figure that out. “You mean… did the…” She bit her lip, not sure if she even wanted to know, but knowing for sure that she wouldn’t make El talk about it right now. “It’s not your fault, El,” she said, stroking her hair. “It’s not, I promise you.”

“I know that,” El said, and couldn’t help a sob bubbling up and out of her raw throat. “It his stupid fault because he stayed on purpose, and your stupid enclave for making him think he had to, even though he didn’t have to, he could have come through with me and he would have been fine.” She didn’t want to, but she turned her head into Chloe’s shoulder anyway. “So stupid.”

“He stayed? On purpose?” Chloe asked, appalled. But, of course, if she thought about it for a moment, she wasn’t surprised. Couldn’t be surprised, really. The only thing that had ever made Orion happy growing up was killing mals. How could he possibly pass up an opportunity to stay and kill every mal in the world, especially when leaving the school meant that he probably wouldn’t see one for years – not until enough wizards had made enough mals for them to escape back into the wild. Assuming their plan had been successful in the first place.

But Orion had seemed so happy with El. With El, he was like a different person. He seemed almost normal sometimes with her. It hadn’t even crossed Chloe’s mind that Orion would ever want to stay in the Scholomance instead of coming out with El, and maybe doing the Great American Roadtrip that Magnus had been trying to plan for graduation.

She wondered if he’d survive. If anyone could, it would be Orion. But even if he did, even if he killed every last mal in the Scholomance, how would he get back home after they’d disconnected the tether to the real world? Her heart ached; she’d loved Orion, had admired and looked up to him, had seen him as a hero in a shining suit of armour, and had been trying really hard to see him as human after El had made her realize that she’d been putting him on a pedestal for most of their life, and the idea that he was gone…

No, Chloe couldn’t accept it. Orion would be okay. Orion had to be okay.

She stroked El’s hair. “I’m so sorry, El,” she said, blinking back her own tears. “Boys are so stupid.”

El couldn’t help thinking that Orion was a particular kind of stupid that wasn’t really his fault, but it hardly mattered at this point. He was gone, he wasn’t coming back, he might live for a few days, running through the halls and playing cat and mouse with Patience, but eventually either the mals or the starvation, or possibly suffocation would get him - there was no way to know how or when, but he might as well already be dead. He was Schrodinger's Orion.

She made herself sit up and scrub her eyes with the back of her hand, which was not exactly clean. She was about to explain about Patience and Fortitude, but caught herself at the last minute, swallowing it away. What Chloe didn’t need to know would only hurt her more. She also didn’t say the words burning the back of her tongue like acid, he told me he loved me. It didn’t matter now, and would never matter.

“Okay,” she said, with a heavy breath. “Okay. I’m going to figure this out. I’ll get us home, okay? If I have a blow a mile-wide hole in this place to do it.”

Chloe wanted to tell her that he’d be okay. He was Orion, so of course he’d be okay. But somehow she couldn’t quite get the words past her throat.

As much as Orion was Orion, he was still only human.

“I know you will,” Chloe said, releasing El from her embrace but keeping her hands on her shoulders. “I’ll help. Between the two of us, we’ll have the mana in no time.”

El privately doubted this; it had taken her the better part of three years to build up almost enough for graduation, and if they really were in another dimension then this would probably be even harder than that. And Chloe’s estimation of mana-building speed was likely to be off, given how long she’d spent mooching off Orion’s mal-killing exploits. But despite all this, she didn’t have the heart to crush the girl’s optimism. If anything, she needed that positivity. One of them had to have some. “Okay,” she said instead. She could cry properly over Orion later, and preferably break some things. “I’ll have to go back and look for the power sharer…”

Chloe’s estimation of mana-building speed was definitely off, but on the bright side, she could probably build it faster than El. It had really only been in the last few months when she’d started building it at all, which meant that the most common method – physical exercise – still developed a lot of mana compared to someone who’d been doing it for the last four years.

“I’ll build up some mana and I’ll cast a locator spell,” Chloe promised. “It shouldn’t be too hard. It wasn’t a spell that she’d used terribly often in the Scholomance – the school had a way of making location spells backfire; if you knew exactly where something was and the school knew you were looking for it, there was likely to be something else waiting there – but it was a spell her dad had used all the time when he’d lost his keys or anything else, and so Chloe knew it by rote.

It was at about this moment that Laurence returned with a plate of sweets pilfered from Lan Xichen’s stash – he thought Lan Xichen wouldn’t mind, and Laurence had made a mental note to replace them when he had the chance regardless.

“Sorry for interrupting,” he said awkwardly, laying down the plate. “Mr. Rutherford says he’ll be here within the half-hour. I can leave you two alone though, should you need more time to talk.”

There were tears smudging El’s face on top of everything else now, but any chance she’d had of making a good impression was surely long gone, so she didn’t much care. “I… think we’re okay,” she said, throwing Chloe a glance just in case. She couldn’t help looking hungrily at the plate, which had actual real food on it, not average-looking food made actually made of of nutritional sludge. “Thanks,” she said, sincerely. She recognised that it was probably a good idea to get as much information about their new surroundings as possible, but the list of questions was both too long to choose from and impossible to generate through the fog of exhaustion. All she could come up with in the moment was, “um… so… are there a lot of dragons like that around here?”

Chloe nodded at El’s glance, before her attention completely to the plate of pastries. She, generally, had pretty good luck with the vending machines at school. Or, at least, she had pretty good luck trading away the undesirable food she got from them for something a little more palpable. She hadn’t been completely deprived of sweets since she entered the Scholomance. But these pastries looked fresher even than she could usually manage, softer and fluffier than even the best vending machine cake, and she just barely stopped herself from immediately grabbing one off the plate.

She gave herself a moment to first make sure that everything looked safe before she reached for one, turning it over in her hands for a quick look-over, and then gave it a tentative sniff before she handed it over to El and grabbed one for herself.

“No,” Laurence said, flashing a look at the dragon that Chloe couldn’t quite read. “No, Teremaire’s the only dragon of his kind here. There are others, but they’re more beast than anything else, and not especially friendly. My partner’s nephew has a dragon companion and there’s another young man who has one as well, but while they seem more intelligent neither one of them seem capable of speech.”

Yet, at least. He didn’t know if they’d ever develop the capacity for it, but Feilong, at least, was young and seemed to be growing and developing much, much slower than the dragons of his own world; perhaps the capacity of speech would come with time.

El wasn’t sure if she was relieved or not. Nearly all misgivings, however, were driven out of her mind entirely when she bit into the delicious pastry. At some point over the last four years she had convinced herself that Scholomance food was basically indistinguishable from the real thing, just not as good as her mother’s cooking. Perhaps this had been a defence mechanism, because it was clearly immediately that there was a very real difference. “Oh my god,” she murmured with her mouth full, and had to try very hard not to burst into tears again.

Laurence didn’t know the details, but he knew the look of young people who hadn’t had a proper meal in sometime, and he smiled at both of them. “Help yourselves to however much you’d like; I can gather more too, if you would like more.”

Except, of course, when Laurence glanced over, he could see Cullen making his way around the covert. “Or, I can pack some up for you to go. It seems as though Mr. Rutherford is here already.”

El grabbed an extra pastry, not really caring if it wasn’t the epitome of politeness, and took another delicious bite before setting her shoulders and preparing for whatever was coming next. She glanced across at Chloe again; all right, she’d admit that if she was going to be stuck in this situation she’d rather be stuck with Liu or Aadya, but at least she wasn’t alone, and she couldn’t help but feel responsible for her, even though Chloe was perfectly capable of taking care of herself; she was willing to be that only she, El, would be able to do whatever was necessary to get them home. So for the time being she would just have to accept it.

“Oh, before you go,” Laurence said as the girls prepared to leave. He reached into his pocket, and pulled out the bracelet he had found in the woods. He thought it must have been El’s; Chloe had one nearly identical on her own wrist. “Does this belong to you?”

“Oh.” El felt her face get a little hot; she hadn’t actually thought she was capable of embarrassment at this point, but apparently there was a tiny nugget of shame still possible to exploit. It wasn’t hers, after all, she shouldn’t have just thrown it away. “Er. Yes. Thanks.” She took it, hoping she hadn’t damaged it in some way, and, after a moment’s hesitation, slipped it on.

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