Chương 22: 22 Loop 1, Part 2

Davos was halfway across the dining hall. I caught him the moment his swagger moved into his shoulders. He was heading straight for Kalin's table, and in about twenty seconds, he was going to grab the kid by his robes and say something vile. And then things were going to get very, very complicated, and very, very loud, and my entire week was going to go wrong again. Unless I stopped it. I let out a long-suffering sigh. Finn looked at me.

"What?" Can't a guy be exasperated when he has to do something? There were so many things that went into the entire clusterfuck of a week, but it all started right here. And who knew? Maybe I'd get lucky, and stopping Kalin from getting his stomach bruised would fix everything else. A boy could dream, right? The problem with Davos Creed was nobody ever stopped him. Faculty looked the other way because the Prime Minister's grandson was untouchable.

And other students never had the appetite because they didn't want to find out just what that meant. Somewhere to my left, a Thessalonian exchange student had decided that wasn't okay. She was getting ready to do something principled and brave and completely pointless. She wouldn't be fast enough. Because rule number one about being lazy is being proactive when people are about to make you do way more work later. Davos reached Kalin's table, grabbed the smaller boy by the robes, and started in.

"Maybe if your country wasn't such a disaster, we wouldn't have scum like you trying to steal good, old-fashioned Restral—" I didn't need to hear the rest. I'd heard it before. And what came after was wolves, fire, and forty-eight hours of batshit insanity. I was not doing that again. As far as I was concerned, Davos Creed was laziness's enemy number one. I flicked my wand under the table and cast two spells. [Squeak] — Enchantment Cost: 6 mana. Raises the pitch of a target's vocalizations by several octaves.

Duration: until dispelled. [Trip] — Enchantment Cost: 4 mana. Ties, tangles, or fuses nearby lacing, cordage, or binding material on a target. Both landed at once. Davos's voice cracked upward mid-sentence. The hard consonant of "foreigner" climbing three octaves into something that sounded like a Frollart being stepped on. At the same time, his boots fused together at the laces. For a moment, he just stood there, squeaking. Then the panic hit.

He grabbed his throat with both hands and lurched forward, and the fused laces did the rest. He pitched face-first into the stone with a sound that I was going to treasure for a very long time. The fire spell he'd been charging landed on the floor on impact. The stone blackened and smoked. Davos pushed himself up. His face was red—partly from the stone, partly from whatever was building behind his eyes.

"What the fuck?" His voice came out in a helium squeal. He grabbed his throat and tried again.

"What's going on with my voice?" It came out higher, if anything. Every word made it worse, and hundreds of students leaned in to enjoy it. The grandson of the most powerful man in Restralia sat on the dining hall floor, squeaking like a bath toy. He couldn't process two problems at once. His brain had chosen the wrong one. To him, the voice was the crisis, not the fall. Kalin laughed. His hand went to his mouth a second too late, the fear of reprisal sharp in his eyes. But then the kid next to him laughed.

And then the table behind them. And soon the whole hall was rolling until everybody was crying laughing. Humiliation, the great equalizer. The fall alone, Davos could have powered through. He had the ego for it. And the voice, he would have been able to bluster past, having one of his lackeys talk for him. But together, he was a richness of embarrassment. An embarrassment of riches? I'd work on the phrasing later. He got to his feet, mouth clamped shut. He unlaced his shoes.

His spine straightened, and despite the continuing laughter, he walked out of the dining hall in a hurry. The doors closed behind him with a bang. The laughter didn't stop all at once. A few tables kept going. Then a few more went quiet. Someone coughed. The Thessalonian exchange student, the one who'd been halfway out of her seat, sat back down and stared at her plate. At Kalin's table, the kid next to him clapped him on the shoulder. Kalin flinched. Within a minute, breakfast had resumed its usual rhythm.

The blackened scorch mark on the floor where the Prime Minister's grandson had been charging a fire spell at a scholarship student would soon be just another stain on the stonework.

"Well, that was easy," I said.

"What did you do?" Finn was watching me with a small frown. It was like he couldn't tell whether I was being brilliant or stupid.

"Solved a problem so there's less work for me to deal with later." I scratched my chin.

"The true secret to laziness, Finn." I was pretty certain that Kalin didn't have the orb yet. But one could never be too sure about those things. I thought I knew when he got it, though. In an hour or so, when he had that weird meeting. I'd figure it out soon. I left the hall without Finn. I wasn't mad at him, exactly. As glad as I was to see him, I didn't want to talk to him. Something about how Sara and Finn cornered me at the tournament felt bad.

That conversation sat wrong in my chest, and I didn't have the energy to figure out why. Not yet. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. I needed a bench. Almost as if guided by rote, my feet went off in the direction of my usual spot. But I didn't want the bench from last time. That bench was in Malus Isher's blast radius, and as much as I liked the guy, I had no interest in taking a [Magiball] to the ribs again. Once per life was plenty.

I headed past the Therumian oaks and past the pickup game already forming on the lower Green. Eventually, I found a quieter spot near the old astronomy tower, where the foot traffic thinned out and the sun pooled warm against the stone wall. The bench was wooden, a little warped from years of sun exposure, but it sat in a patch of light so warm it practically shone gold. Better than good enough. I could have slept in my dorm, but that would have increased the likelihood of running into Finn.

I sat down, then immediately reconsidered sitting and chose lying instead. My robe went under my head. The sun found my face. The heat soaked through my makeshift pillow. The breeze had stopped. The only sound was the pickup game on the lower Green, far enough away that I couldn't make out the words even with [Subtitle]. But I couldn't just sleep out here all day. That was the tragedy. In about an hour, Kalin Tuffet was supposed to have a meeting by the kitchens.

The one where, last time, he'd taken something from a woman—something he'd then used at the tournament to kill Finn and bring the whole week crashing down. I could quibble about whether Kalin was really responsible for my uncle later. Point was, I needed to stop this. Time travel was going to be so much work. I couldn't afford to miss that exchange. Which meant I needed to wake up on time. Which meant I needed an alarm. For the first time in my adult life, I was voluntarily setting a timer.

I hated everything about this. I picked up a pebble from the base of the bench and turned it over in my fingers. Small, smooth, slightly warm from the sun. It would do." [Alarm]," I said, feeding the intent into the stone. [Alarm — Enchantment] Cost: 5 mana. Enchants an object to emit a sharp sound after a set duration. The pebble hummed once and went still. One hour. I tucked it into my breast pocket, where it pulsed faintly against my chest with its stored mana. 105 out of 370. Not exactly great.

But sleep would fix that. Sleep fixed everything, and I felt like I hadn't slept in days. I closed my eyes. The sun pressed against my eyelids, turning the darkness amber. Somewhere far away, a bird was doing something musical and pointless, and the breeze carried the faint smell of magically cut grass and old stone. My shoulders unknotted one muscle at a time, slow and stubborn, until the ache between my spine and neck finally let go. The bench held me exactly right. The birdsong stretched out and thinned.

The warmth on my face lost its edges. I was asleep before I finished the thought. I slept hard. But it was over too quick. The pebble screamed. It screamed directly into my sternum with a sharp, clean note that hit the bone and kept hitting until I moved. I sat up with a jolt, hand going to my chest, heart hammering. The pebble was warm and spent, its enchantment already dissolving. I dropped it on the ground.

"Fuck you, rock." I kicked it for good measure. Somewhere on campus, a flagstone with a soul and strong opinions about object rights was probably offended on the rock's behalf. Five out of five on execution. Zero out of ten on user experience. I'd need a different spell if I was ever stupid enough to do that again. I sat on the bench for a minute and let the world come back to me. The sun had moved, but the day hadn't. That was the nice part. Everything was exactly as ordinary as it was supposed to be.

Down on the lower Green, the pickup game had stopped, and Malus was now juggling a [Magiball] between his knees. Two other fourth-years tried to knock it away with increasingly creative applications of magic. A group of first-years were studying under the oaks, their textbooks open but their attention mostly on each other. No one was panicking. No one was screaming. Most importantly of all, nobody was dead. I sighed in relief. I could have stayed there and people-watched for hours. I wanted to stay there.

But there were a couple of people in particular I had to look out for. I checked the kitchen entrance. [Wideview] and [Subtitle] were still running, and the spot where Kalin had met the woman last time was empty. No Kalin. No woman. I waited five minutes. Then ten. The spot stayed empty. After fifteen minutes, the kitchen door opened, and I thought something was about to happen. But it was just a cook who came out to grab a sack of flour from the outside storage. The meeting wasn't happening.

Something I'd done this morning had already changed the timeline enough to shift Kalin's schedule—or the woman's, or both. I didn't think stopping Davos would really make that much of a difference. It was a schoolyard fight. But apparently the distance between a bully getting humiliated and a clandestine handoff not occurring was shorter than I'd assumed. I put that away in my ever-growing folder of things I didn't understand and would probably regret not understanding sooner. Movement on the Green caught my eye.

Finn was crossing from the direction of the dining hall, chin up, scanning the grounds for somebody specific. Most likely me. I was off the bench and moving before he spotted me. I cut behind the astronomy tower and cast [Stride]. The shoes hummed and lifted me three inches off the ground, and I glided out of Finn's sightline before he'd made it past the oaks. The nice thing about [Stride] was that it eliminated any need for effort. I could move in all directions at a moderate pace without worry.

It did look ridiculous, but I guess that was an added bonus. I took the colonnade to the north quad, cut through the herb garden behind the Manifestation labs, and came out on the far side of Ashwood Hall. Nobody from the Green could see me there, which was the point. It was the long way around, inefficient by any reasonable standard. But avoiding Finn meant avoiding a different kind of effort. One I wasn't ready to deal with.

How did I talk to him without crying in joy that he was alive, or getting mad at him for something he hadn't even done? I floated the rest of the way into our dorm. Our room was dark and cool and empty and perfect. I kicked off my shoes, pulled the blanket up to my chin, and sank into the mattress. I didn't bother with an alarm this time. I wasn't planning on attending Enchantment class. And if my uncle really wanted me at our dinner, he'd find me. He always did.

The pillow was cool against my face, a nice contrast from the sun-warmed bench. This had turned out to be a perfect day so far. Full of laughter and relaxation and not dealing with however the fuck I was feeling about Finn. The consequences of skipping class and Finn were a problem for later.

"Later" was a beautiful place where problems lived, and I had no intention of visiting early. But this time, sleep didn't come yet. I saw Finn and Sara yelling at me for the match. I saw the dragon bite a person in half. I saw Finn's sunken face. I saw my uncle fall from the sky. My mom on a stretcher. I wasn't sure when I fell asleep.