AFTER HIS SMALL VICTORY IN mastering the first Healing spell, Fort strode across the base feeling hopeful for once.
Look at my boy! his father would have said. Mastering spells in one day when it takes other people a week? Make him King Wizard already, people. Otherwise you’re just wasting all of our time!
The sadness flowed over him, just like it always did when he thought about his father, but with it now came determination. Even if it was just Healing, at least Fort was learning magic, and that was the first step to getting justice for his father. And while it might . . . not . . .
Fort stopped in place, noticing for the first time that the various guards nearby were all staring at him nervously. What was going on?
A shadow appeared on his left, and almost without thinking about it, Fort jumped out of the way, right before a ball of fire struck the ground where he’d been standing.
“Whoops!” Trey said, snickering as he, Bryce, and Chad came up behind Fort. “Sorry about that. My fireball got away from me.”
Fort looked around to see if there were any teachers or school officials to notice what was happening, but of course the Destruction boys had checked first. “No Sebastian or Rachel to save you this time,” Chad whispered, his hand glowing too.
Bryce’s hands pulsed with red energy, and Fort’s feet froze in place, ice forming on the ground around his boots. He struggled to pull them free, but the ice was too thick. “Don’t worry,” Bryce said quietly. “You can just blame whatever happens on another monster attack.”
The other boys laughed as anger filled Fort’s mind. He swung his fist out wildly but only succeeded in almost falling over his stuck boots. “Let me go,” he hissed.
“Was it a big monster this time?” Chad said, and set the edge of Fort’s shirt on fire.
“Were you scared?” Trey asked, sending a magic missile slamming into Fort’s shoulder even as Fort tried to slap out the fire.
“Did you cry?” Bryce whispered, shaking his hands back and forth, sending tremors through the ground below Fort’s feet.
“I wasn’t lying about what I saw!” Fort shouted, and swung for the nearest boy again, this time missing only by inches. The shaking increased below his feet, and the ice around his boots cracked enough for him to kick his way free. He straightened up to face the three boys, then fell to his knees as the earth began to quake more violently.
“Are you doing this?” he shouted up at Bryce.
But the three boys just laughed at him. “He can’t even stand up!” Trey said. “This must be the worst monster attack yet!”
Fort tried to stand, but the tremors were so intense, he just fell back to the ground. This just made the boys laugh even harder, which was all the more frustrating since they seemed to have no trouble standing.
“What are you three doing to him?” a soldier asked, striding over toward them.
“They’re shaking the ground so hard I can’t stand up!” Fort shouted.
The soldier just looked at him in confusion. “Try to get to your feet, kid. It’s okay.”
Fort slowly pushed himself to his knees again, making the three boys laugh hysterically. Then a massive jolt sent him flat onto the tiled floor, where he braced himself as items on tables began to shake all around him.
“What is happening?” he heard someone shout, a familiar voice. Sierra’s voice.
This was another dream? Another memory?
And then Dr. Opps was there, looking terrified but still in control, and suddenly Fort wasn’t so sure. “We need to get out of the building!” the headmaster shouted, and moved toward Fort to help him to his feet. But the shaking was so intense, it knocked Dr. Opps against a nearby wall before he could reach Fort.
“It’s another attack!” Fort shouted as loudly as he could, but somehow couldn’t hear himself over the rumbling. Even as terror filled his body, he realized that this couldn’t be real: A moment before, he’d been outside getting bullied by Bryce, Chad, and Trey, not inside some strange room with Dr. Opps. So the shaking hadn’t been real either, just the beginnings of this . . . this daydream?
“You need to send it back!” Dr. Opps shouted from across the room as parts of the ceiling began to collapse, sending showers of dust and materials down all around them. “Close the portal and send it back to wherever it came from!”
“What?” Fort shouted, still not hearing himself, and definitely not understanding. What portal? Who was Dr. Opps talking to?
“He can’t hear you!” Sierra shouted, and now it made sense why she sounded so close: He was seeing everything from inside her mind, her memory of what had happened. “Damian’s completely gone!”
And that was when Fort saw Damian and almost stopped breathing completely. The creature from the officers’ mess had Damian’s head in its tentacle hands, grabbing him through a glowing green portal. Damian was shuddering beneath the creature’s touch, and opaque armor was growing over his chest.
“Jia!” Dr. Opps shouted. “See if you can use your magic to revert his mind to a past version!”
“On it!” Jia shouted, and Fort was surprised to see her in the room with them. She slid toward Damian on the ground and threw a hand out to grab his ankle. Blue light began to glow from her hand, and the creature in the portal pulled back abruptly from Damian.
And then the room shook so hard they all lost their footing, and a massive clawed finger burst through the floor right below him, sending Fort flying against the wall. He landed hard, and the room began to spin, this time not from the quaking.
“It’s here!” Dr. Opps shouted. “Jia, you need to free his mind now!”
“I’m trying!” Jia shouted from just on the other side of the creature’s massive claw. “But whatever that thing is, it’s fighting back, negating my spells. I don’t know what to . . . wait, I can feel it . . . NO!” She screamed then, loud and terrified, pulling her hands away from Damian and holding her head like it was going to fly apart.
Then her scream cut off abruptly, and a much deeper voice emerged from her mouth. “YOU WILL NOT DEFY ME FURTHER, HUMAN.”
Fort felt his blood go even colder at her words, and he looked over to see the same terror on Dr Opps’s face.
“This can’t be happening,” the headmaster whispered, only to turn to Fort, or really, Sierra. “It’s up to you. It’s taken over her mind. You need to free them both!”
Before Sierra could respond, though, another scaled finger broke through the floor, and Fort found himself frantically rolling away before a third claw exploded through the floor below him.
“Free their minds, now!” Dr. Opps shouted, his voice filled with panic. “If you don’t, we’re all going to die here!”
“I’ll try!” Sierra shouted, and a strange feeling overtook Fort. Somehow, he felt his consciousness reaching up out of his body and floating through the air to enter Jia’s mind. Instantly Fort cringed at the absolute darkness he found within, completely repulsed by the awful, oily feeling of whatever it was that had taken over Jia’s consciousness. He felt himself slowly pushing his own mind through hers, yanking the other creature off Jia’s brain like ivy from a wall.
Then Fort/Sierra floated back across the room and collapsed against the wall.
“Jia’s free,” Sierra said. “But I . . . I saw something in the Old One’s mind. . . .”
An image played through Fort’s perceptions, one that he’d had nightmares about for the past six months.
The National Mall, and a monster just like the one below them attacking the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.
“It summoned a second monster,” Sierra whispered. “Using Damian’s powers. It sent it to the Mall. There are people there!”
“The priority is Damian!” Dr. Opps shouted. “We need his power to send these things back!”
“I know,” Sierra said out loud, but inside, Fort felt his mind soar away, out of a large windowed office building and over highways filled with cars, down through a city with no skyscrapers to where the ground shook around the Washington Monument, and people were realizing that something was wrong.
RUN! Sierra commanded in their minds, using every ounce of her strength. GO NOW, IN AN ORDERLY FASHION!
No. NO. Fort couldn’t watch what was to about to happen, not again. Not again!
Let me go! he shouted as loudly as he could, hoping she could hear him wherever she was, pushing this dream, this memory onto him. Don’t make me watch this. Please don’t make me watch this!
The scene around him began to waver, like the air in intense heat. He shouted again and again in his mind, hoping to push Sierra out of his head, or at least stop the memory.
Blue sky began to filter in from above, where previously office lights had been. All around him, he could just make out several soldiers holding their weapons aimed at him, interspersed with the attack in Sierra’s memory. “No!” he shouted, holding up his hands. “I’m okay!”
“No you’re not,” Dr. Ambrose said from his side, her image appearing and disappearing inside the memory. “I’m going to sedate him. Someone be ready to grab him!”
“No!” Fort shouted again, but then felt something prick his shoulder, and both memory and reality faded away into nothingness.