Chapter Nine: Lockdown | Part 2
“Give that back!” Rhea dove for Benn’s bed, but he was too fast, casting a bubble around himself that Rhea bounced off of. Thirtyx choked back a snicker. By the time she had righted herself, Benn was studying the paper, turning it slowly in his hands.
“You study for comps your way, and I study mine,” Rhea grumbled, drawing a neutralizing sigil on the shield. It disappeared with a delightful pop. She lunged at Benn again, but he waited until the exact moment she fell off balance before he stood up on his mattress, well out of her reach.
The only sign that an iota of his attention had been directed at the motion was his slight smirk. “You study for Comps by… trying to devise a way to track who attacked Grimm?” The way he peered disapprovingly at her over the paper’s edge made even Thirtyx feel sheepish.
Rhea scrambled onto the bed, but Benn held the page high above her head. She tried to grapple him, but the Sigraexil expert slipped out of her grasp with little effort and left her flat on the bed again as he crossed the room. “What are you planning to cast this on? The bloodfire they leached out of him?”
“That would be abundantly clear if you looked at the second quadrant, moron,” Rhea growled, righting herself again. Finally accepting the futility of fighting him, she sat, arms crossed in a spectacular pout, on the edge of Benn’s bed. “I know bloodfire is insanely hard to trace, but that’s because they typically can’t separate the victim’s essence from the user’s. But Grimm’s essence has traces of Pfah magic! If we can use that as a sort of filtering criteria, we could end up with a trackable product.”
Benn flashed her that condescending look again. “He told us not to interfere.”
“It’s not interference if it’s helping. No one else would know to try this! And if you disagree, you can give that back to me and ignore its existence.”
“Oh, I’ll happily give it back.” He scooped Rhea’s pencil off the desk. “After I make a few adjustments.”
“OVER MY DEAD BODY!” Rhea roared. “Design your own if you think you can do better!”
She crossed the room in two steps, but Benn still found a deft way to hold the paper out of her reach. “I didn’t say they were major adjustments! But look here, in quadrant three. Don’t you think that Gaohl stroke would be a lot stronger if you made it clockwise instead of counterclockwise? Especially if the culprit is a Verith or Troll like they’re thinking it might be.”
“I tried it counterclockwise, but it bumps into the pooled stroke right above it. This is the only way it works with any sort of stability!”
Benn relented and lowered the paper so they could both see it. “Okay, maybe, but this still isn’t castable. There’s a paradox right next to those pooled strokes.”
“I didn’t say I was done with it! You grabbed it from me mid edit!”
Thirtyx chuckled to himself as the siblings bickered. It was comforting background noise—not to mention a tasty snack—as he continued on with the chapter he was dissecting. The Comps study group had gone over it long before he joined, but Seerla had copied a comprehensive note set for him. He withdrew it from his notebook and was equally comforted by her tidy, looping handwriting adding context to the lesson.
The next day’s free period found the three of them at their usual table in the library. While Benn had started out studying, he’d quickly been drawn into a mental conversation with Rhea about the tracking sigil. Thirtyx enjoyed watching them scowl at each other over seemingly nothing while he caught up on homework he’d been neglecting in his quest to prepare for the Law Comp.
Eventually, though, their increasingly animated facial expressions became boring, and Thirtyx found his eyes drawn to Seerla. Seerla, who sat at a large table alongside most of their Law Comp study group. Seerla, who was suddenly packing up her things. Seerla, who was stalking away from the table to a round of laughter.
Seerla, who was headed this way?
“Guys, you’d better hide that sigil,” Thirtyx hissed right before Seerla flung herself into the open chair. Fortunately, the sigil managed to disappear in the midst of the startled limb flailing that followed.
Not that Seerla, with no background in magic, could have deciphered it any better than Thirtyx could have.
Calley Jones 