DAMIAN!” SIERRA SAID, LOOKING OVER at the other boy. “Are you . . . yourself?”
Fort slowly pulled himself up to the bed and watched Damian pat himself on the arms and chest. “I think so?” Damian said, sounding relieved. “Whatever you did, I think it pushed the Old One out of my mind.” He pulled his legs out from under the covers and placed them on the floor, then tried to stand up, only to wobble shakily. “What’s . . . what’s wrong with me?”
“You’ve been . . . unconscious,” Fort said, not very stable himself as his head continued to pound. “In a coma. For a while. I’m not sure how long.”
“I have?” Damian asked, leaning back against the bed while giving Fort a suspicious look. “Who are you?”
“Fort, what are you doing here?” Sierra whispered, turning back to him with a concerned look. “Does that mean everything I’ve been dreaming . . . oh no. No no no! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean . . . what have I . . . oh no.” She dropped her head into her hands. “I saw you come to the school, and you were so worried, I tried to help. But everyone had secrets, things they wouldn’t tell you. I wanted you to know what they knew . . . but you kept thinking about the attack in D.C., too, and I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t stop remembering—”
“There was an attack?” Damian said, trying to stand again. “Did something happen?”
Sierra’s eyes widened. “You don’t remember?”
“The last thing I remember is you making me close a portal,” he said. “Then the Old One took over, and . . .” He started to look sick. “Oh, what did I do?”
Fort pushed to his feet, for once just letting the rage build, not even caring. “Everything that happened . . . it’s because of you,” he yelled at Damian. “There was an attack. Two, actually. One of them killed Michael, your friend. And the other one killed my father.”
Damian’s face lost all its color, and he fell back to the bed, shaking his head. “I . . . I’m so sorry. I didn’t . . . I never would have—”
“Fort, it wasn’t him,” Sierra said quietly, also trying to stand, but her legs were too weak. “You saw my memories. The Old One had control, not Damian. He couldn’t help it. It wasn’t his fault.”
“Except you were the one who let it in,” Fort said to Damian, slowly rounding the beds, trying to stay calm so that the other boy wouldn’t run. Fort wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep up in his current shape, and there was no way he was letting Damian escape, not now. “Even when Dr. Opps told you not to communicate with them. But you thought you could handle it. And because of you, people died.”
Damian looked up at him, his mouth hanging open. “They could have taught us so much,” he said, his voice almost too quiet to hear. “I saw it in that thing’s mind. They discovered magic! I knew it couldn’t be trusted, but I thought that we could learn from it and send it back. And the risk would be worth all the good that would have come from it. . . .”
“Fort, back away,” Sierra said, holding out a hand toward him, and he felt a gentle pull on his mind, less an order than a suggestion that he move away from Damian. “You . . . you shouldn’t be here right now.”
“I shouldn’t be here?” Fort said, his voice rising. “The attack in D.C. was his fault! My father died because of him. And you want me to just go back to the dorm and forget about this?”
“It wasn’t me,” Damian said, his voice sounding more gravelly now, like he was about to cry or something. But Fort barely noticed, trying to decide if he should cast his Paralyze spell on Damian first, or just use his fists.
“Fort, STOP!” Sierra shouted, and this time, her voice echoed in his mind, a telepathic command he couldn’t ignore. His legs froze to the ground, so he slowly twisted around to look at Sierra, who was trembling wildly from the effort of holding him in place. “You don’t know what’s happening here. You don’t want to do this!”
“You don’t know me,” Fort growled at her, pushing back against her command. “You have no idea what I want!”
I know everything about you, she shouted in his mind, slowly sinking back to the bed as her magic took a toll on her. I’ve been inside your mind for months, Forsythe Fitzgerald. I was in it during the attack, just like I was in everyone’s mind there. But you wouldn’t leave! The rest of them ran, but you stayed, for your father. I had to push you harder, and I saw everything, everything you did! Don’t you think I wanted to help him too?
Fort clenched his jaw, exerting all of his might to break her spell, and he could see the effect his struggle was having on Sierra. But her thoughts in his head just pushed him onward. She didn’t get to just explain away her role in his father’s death. If she hadn’t pulled him away, his dad might still be alive!
It wasn’t your fault he was taken! she thought in his head. If I hadn’t made you run, you would have been on the steps with your father when that monster grabbed him, and the only difference would be that you’d be gone now too. The creature is the one to blame for all of this!
“You’re wrong!” Fort shouted. “I could have saved him. All it would have taken was one extra minute, maybe even less. But you made me run!”
“The Old One knew so much,” Damian said, sounding even worse now, his voice fading in and out. “It promised it would open my mind to the universe and all of reality. It could teach me things about magic that no book could possibly contain. Humans wrote our books of magic, it said. And for that reason, they were all flawed . . . we never understood the true power, it said. We put limits on it. . . .”
“I’m so sorry,” Sierra said out loud, almost flat on the bed now, one hand clasping her head like she was trying to hold it together, the other pointing at Fort. “Everything had gone wrong, and I couldn’t let anyone get hurt. We had no idea what we were doing! We just wanted to help people!”
“And what about him?” Fort shouted, pointing at Damian. “Was he helping people when his creature killed my father?!”
“You know what it’s like, trying to learn from the books!” Sierra said, groaning from the pain now. “And look at how I helped you get ahead. Think what you would have done in Damian’s place, just to learn the first three Healing spells! We didn’t understand what the Old Ones were, that they’d been waiting for us, waiting for magic to return!”
“It was in my head,” Damian said, and now Fort barely recognized his voice at all. “I . . . I couldn’t take it. It had seen the beginning, and will be here until the end. Thousands, millions of years. I felt its hatred for us, that humanity betrayed them, exiled them from their home. But it told me that I could . . . MAKE UP FOR . . . HUMANITY’S MISTAKE, IF I JUST UNLOCKED THE DOOR—”
Fort slowly turned back to Damian, disturbed by the boy’s words, but even more so by the fact he’d heard the last part in his head. And that was when he saw something that made his heart stop.
Damian wasn’t alone in his body anymore.
The shadowy, half-transparent Old One from the officers’ mess pushed its way into Damian’s body, overlapping him completely, and opaque crystal armor slowly began to grow over Damian’s hospital gown. The boy’s hands and feet stretched out and split into a mass of tentacles, as did his teeth, now protruding from a skull-like helmet. And within seconds, where there had once been a human boy, now there was only an Old One, Damian’s body transformed by the creature into its own form.
“No!” Sierra shouted, trying to run to Damian, but Fort quickly grabbed her, holding her back. “I thought I expelled it from him. I didn’t know!”
Fort stepped in front of her, his hands raised and his Healing spells at the ready. “You might have,” he whispered, as the creature rose into the air, its attention seemingly taken with its transformation. “I think this one’s been searching for him but couldn’t find him while he was asleep. Sierra, you need to wipe the magic from his mind right now. Before it figures out how to access it.”
“I’ll try,” she said, and pointed her raised palm at the Old One. But the creature just stared at her for a moment and she collapsed to the floor, her body shuddering as shadows played over her eyes.
And just like that, Fort’s legs were free. He leaped at the Old One, the only spell he could think of that might actually hurt this thing at the front of his mind: Cause Heavy Wounds. Without having mastered it, he’d just have the one chance, but maybe that’d be enough.
“Mon—” he started to shout, only for the Old One’s tentacle to snake out and wrap around his throat. The tentacle squeezed, cutting off Fort’s air, and with it, the rest of his spell.
WE HAVE FOUND THE ONE WE SEARCHED FOR, the creature’s voice erupted in Fort’s head as it and Sierra both rose a few feet off the ground. WE WILL TOLERATE NO FURTHER INTERFERENCE.
Fort’s air began to run out, and he struggled to free himself, or even just to breathe, but the Old One held him tightly as another tentacle moved toward Fort’s head. It gently brushed against him, and his mind filled with the presence of something too large to be contained by such a small skull.
Millions of years of memories flooded into Fort’s mind. Stars appeared, lived out their lifetimes, then exploded, while billions of species winked in and out of existence. Nothing in his own life mattered now, not in the face of such an existence. To the Old One, Fort lived for less time than an insect, and had just as much impact.
And the creature’s knowledge! It understood concepts that humans wouldn’t discover for thousands of years. Its senses weren’t contained to three dimensions, and Fort couldn’t take the overload of information coming from the tenth, fifteenth, twentieth dimensions.
Tears rolled down his face as the creature’s presence filled his mind, and he wanted to laugh, to scream, anything to stop the madness he was forced to see, the millennia of life that he couldn’t comprehend. He couldn’t contain this much time, this much awareness of the universe.
Please, stop, he whispered in his head, willing to do anything if it just released him, let him never have to witness these horrors again.
And strangely, it did. The Old One abandoned Fort’s mind and dropped his body, and his awareness crumbled back to just three dimensions, his own life, his own memories, his own time. He collapsed to the floor, gasping for breath.
The thing that had been Damian turned its attention from him to now stare at two shaking soldiers standing in the doorway.
“Stop!” one shouted, aiming his weapon at the Old One.
The creature just stared at them for a moment, then raised several tentacles. YOU HAVE NO TAINT OF MAGIC IN YOU, AND SO WILL MAKE FOR PERFECT SERVANTS, AS IS HUMANITY’S DESTINY. AND THIS TIME, THERE WILL BE NO REBELLION.
Tentacles exploded out from the Old One’s hand, piercing the two soldier’s minds. They screamed, their bodies shaking violently, only to abruptly go silent and stand up straight.
And then they turned their weapons on Fort.