After their chemistry lesson, only Professor Merridy’s Environmental Studies class remained. Tristan tried to pay attention to her convoluted explanation about plate tectonics and weather patterns, but his mind was still on Alldusk’s lesson.
So he had an affinity for magic…would his powers have continued to surface even without training, leading to more unexplained surges of energy like the one that had defeated Cob at long last?
Would he have grown dangerous, unable to control his powers?
And had the professors somehow been able to select students with a high propensity for magic? Amber could already see auras. Surely her recruitment had been no accident—
Tristan was startled from his daze by a crack—Leila had hit Zeke with the textbook Merridy had just handed out.
“Ow!” Zeke howled. “Damn it, Leila, I’ll—”
“Enough!” Merridy snapped.
Tristan blinked at Leila. It appeared that Zeke had been digging surreptitiously through Leila’s bag; when she had noticed, she had slammed her textbook onto his head.
“Leila, please, this is not a detention center.” Merridy’s eyes narrowed behind her glasses. “Zeke, are you quite all right?”
Zeke got to his feet, massaging his head. “I’ll survive,” he said sourly, aiming a kick at Leila’s ankle.
“An hour of punishment, Leila,” Merridy said. “Class dismissed.”
“Why do the assholes always get off easy?” Leila muttered, cramming her copy of Earth Science and Environmental Studies into her bag.
That afternoon, Tristan faced his homework with more excitement than he had felt since second grade, when homework had still been a novel concept that made him feel infinitely more grown up.
He wished Alldusk had assigned them a textbook; he would love to read more about why exactly burning things gave off that magic vapor, and how it congealed into a solid marble-sized nugget of power.
Instead he clambered to his top bunk and cracked open his copy of A Practical Guide to Magical Healing once more.
Around him, Leila and Cailyn were riffling through their new textbooks as well; Eli had persuaded Rusty and Trey to join him in a game of cards, though Trey kept glancing guiltily over one shoulder at his pile of textbooks; Zeke lounged in his bed, tossing a hacky sack from hand to hand; Hayley was sweeping the marble floor with a broom she had found who knew where; Evangeline appeared to be sketching something, though she kept the notebook tilted up, away from the prying eyes of her classmates; Damian was using his pen to gouge something into the side of his bunk; and Amber had disappeared entirely.
After dinner—which was another feast to rival the previous night—those who had not made a start on their homework finally turned to their textbooks. Eli did this with much grumbling; finally Damian shouted, “Will you idiots shut up?”
Leila slammed her textbook closed. “This is hopeless. I can’t concentrate. You’d think they would have somewhere better for us to write notes than on our beds.”
Hayley gestured to the haphazard collection of desks, wardrobes, and drawers lining the wall on either side of the door. “If we rearranged those, we could actually use them.”
Following a heated debate, Leila and Damian came to the decision that the room should be divided in half by the assorted furniture. Damian and anyone who wanted to join him would take the right side, while Tristan, Leila, and the others claimed the left.
While Cassidy and Zeke stood to the side, making scathing comments instead of helping, the other students worked together to create a makeshift wall. Tristan was relieved to establish distance between himself and Damian—the students who had gravitated toward him all looked mean and intimidating. Damian, Zeke, and Cassidy were joined by a tall girl Tristan thought was called Stacy Walden, along with two boys he didn’t know.
After standing near the door for a long time, biting her lip and shifting from foot to foot, Evangeline chose a bunk on Tristan’s side of the room.
Claiming one of the newly-moved desks, Tristan hurriedly jotted notes on his assigned reading. He had struggled to identify the clippings from Professor Gracewright’s botany class, and judging by the frowns of his fellow classmates, they were having no more luck than he. When Rusty asked Tristan if they could work together, they quickly realized the contents of each bag were different.
Settling for his best guesses, he finally packed away his books late at night, hoping his work would be enough to win him favor with their professors. He fell asleep quickly…
…and slipped into a nightmare. The darkness resolved into a flash of brilliant light, the sudden illumination of a curve in the highway…why hadn’t he turned? The wheel was cold in his grasp, and everything was sluggish…a terrified scream and a thud, and Marcus was splayed beside him on the seat, hair limp and damp with sweat. Tristan’s eyes burned.
See what you’ve done, the darkness hissed.
Tristan threw his arms over his head, cheeks wet with tears, and tried to stifle the vision. Go away. Leave me alone. I hate you.
There was a hand on his shoulder, shaking him, and he knew it wasn’t part of the dream. Swallowing fiercely, he forced his eyes open.
Leila stood on the corner of Rusty’s bed, craning to see his face in the dim light of a single lamp. “Are you all right?” she whispered. “You were talking in your sleep.”
Tristan realized his eyes were wet—he really had been crying.
Embarrassed, he threw his covers over his head. “I’m fine.” His voice was muffled. In the silence that followed, he knew Leila was still watching him. “Thank you,” he whispered at last.
Leila squeezed his shoulder gently and then retreated.
Sleep eluded Tristan after that.
He had not dreamed of Marcus for over a month. Why did the nightmares have to return now?
Tristan pressed his face into the pillow, hating himself, angry that he had thought the Underground Academy would change anything.
No matter where he went or what he become, Marcus was never coming back.
He would always be a murderer.
In the morning, Tristan resolved anew to succeed at his studies.
Maybe if he learned enough, he would be able to save kids like Marcus when their weak hearts failed them. Maybe he would finally understand the strange circumstances of that ill-fated night—the earthquake and fire that drove him to his reckless, fatal decision.
He stumbled to the boys’ bathroom before any of his fellows rose and stood in the shower for ages, trying to wash away the memory of his nightmare.
When Tristan finished his shower and dressed in his uniform, he stood before the mirror and studied his reflection, pulling his hair back from his face to examine the scars.
Even months after the crash, his face had hardly improved. The gashes across his left cheek and through his eyebrow had healed badly—the scars were red and mottled, his skin rejoined in raised contours, as though something evil was trying to take root there.
With a grimace, Tristan dragged his hair violently back into place.
In their medicine class that day, Professor Grindlethorn called forward Finley Glenn, one of the boys Tristan hadn’t known the day before, to participate in a demonstration. Finley, squat and bespectacled, looked confused when his name was called. His jacket was inside out.
“Glenn. Have you experienced a major injury?”
Bobbing his head, Finley almost walked into a desk on his way to the front.
“When I was twelve, I fractured my radius and tore the ligaments. I still have the scar.” He folded up the cuff of his left sleeve and showed Grindlethorn his wrist.
A thrill of excitement ran through Tristan—could Grindlethorn heal the scars on his face?
“Shoddy work,” Grindlethorn said. “With proper care, this scar should have disappeared entirely.” He gripped Finley’s wrist with his stout fingers. “The bone is still weak. We might be able to improve that.” He turned Finley’s wrist over, pinching and prodding at the boy’s flesh. “Try eating less for the next month, Glenn. With so much fat around the bone, strengthening it will prove challenging.”
Finley turned bright red and tugged his arm away from Grindlethorn’s probing fingers.
Tristan’s excitement faded. He wasn’t going to ask anyone to heal his scars if it meant public humiliation.
When they climbed the stairs for botany that afternoon, the students were awarded their first real view of the school’s surroundings. At first Tristan didn’t know what was happening when he found himself at the back of a holdup on the stairs; there was a great deal of shoving and cursing, and Zeke shouted, “Move it, spotty!” at Leila.
She didn’t seem to hear him. She and Eli had frozen in the doorway, staring at something just out of sight; elbowing past Damian and Cassidy, Tristan edged his way to the top of the stairs…and stopped.
The mist had lifted, and in its absence the world had grown a hundred times larger. What had appeared to be an endless pine forest enveloping the school was nothing more than a tree-filled valley, beyond which loomed craggy mountains draped with glaciers. The midday sun glinted off every peak, smoothing out their crevices in a blinding sheen of white.
For a heartbeat, Tristan thought he could see the aura of the mountains, a faint turquoise shimmer that swirled and flared in the wind. When he blinked, the color vanished.
“That’s something,” Leila said quietly.
Rusty blundered into Leila from behind. “Whoops—sorry, Leila, I didn’t see you.”
She rolled her eyes.
“There you are,” an amused voice remarked.
Tearing his eyes from the mountains, Tristan saw Gracewright making her way toward the students, her face lost in the shadow beneath her wide-brimmed sunhat.
“It’s a real beauty, isn’t it? After a time you forget how it is to live anywhere else.”
When Gracewright stopped in front of round-faced Hayley Christiansen and stubby little Finley Glenn, she was beaming. “Well, I can see you kids won’t be much use in a sit-down lesson today. I hope you have your textbooks—we’re going to do a bit of a scavenger hunt.”
From a pocket in her heavy green apron, Gracewright produced a stack of papers, which she handed to Finley. “Pass those around,” she prompted; he had been squinting at the top of the stack. “You will each receive a list of important magical and medicinal plants; each specimen on this list can be found within a mile of this school. Whoever manages to find the most plants from this list will be excused from tonight’s homework. Oh, and speaking of which—” she held out her hands— “please return last night’s homework before you start.”
Tristan reluctantly dug his pouch of clippings and his list of guesses from his bag. He knew he had failed the assignment; he needed to do a better job at today’s challenge, or he risked getting kicked out of the Underground Academy.
Once Gracewright had collected his homework, Tristan frowned down at the list Finley had handed him. There were two columns running down the page—one was headed “Magical Specimens,” the other “Medicinal Plants.”
“I don’t recognize any of these,” Leila said. “Look—spotted jewelweed? Hooked crowfoot? Gnome plant? These sound ridiculous.”
Rusty laughed. “Gnome plant? What’s that supposed to be?”
With a groan, Tristan let his copy of Beyond the Basics: Magical and Medicinal Herbs fall open to the center. “Is it magical or medicinal?” He would be lucky to find even a single specimen from this list.
“Magical,” Rusty said. “But maybe it’s in the Encyclopedia of Botany, too. That’ll mean it’s real.”
Tristan flipped to the index of his textbook while Rusty began thumbing through his Encyclopedia.
“Of course it’s real,” Leila said impatiently. “How are we supposed to hunt for it otherwise? We just need a picture.”
“You know what I meant,” Rusty said. “Aha—I found it!”
Tristan looked up from his own book as Rusty read aloud the passage he’d found.
“Gnome Plant, or Hemitomes congestum, is a small, extremely rare flower limited to the northwest coastal region of North America.”
Leila snorted. “That’s really helpful. What does the other book say, Tristan?”
After a moment, he found the right page. “It says, ‘Apart from its high-volume production of congealed magic’—I think that means those golden orbs—‘the gnome plant may also be used to slow or cease magical reactions.” The passage continued for the remainder of the page, though none of the description seemed useful in identifying the Gnome Plant.
Tristan slammed the book shut. “Why don’t we start with something less rare?” He scanned the list of plants again. “Wild ginger, for instance—that’s something I’ve heard of before.”
Once Tristan, Leila, and Rusty had studied the picture of wild ginger until Tristan was sure he could recognize the dark, heart-shaped leaves, they set off into the trees, heading in three different directions.
Before long, he came across Amber, who was kneeling beside a tree and easing a small plant from the soil, its roots intact. She looked up briefly, blinked at Tristan, and returned her gaze to the ground.
“What’s that?” he asked, scanning his list.
“I don’t know, but its aura is brighter than usual. I think it means the plant has a higher concentration of magic.”
When Amber stood and slipped away, Tristan dropped to the ground where she’d knelt, trying to see which plant she’d unearthed. There were several tiny leaves hugging the base of the pine, along with a clump of moss—though none of these resembled the plant Amber had uprooted, Tristan plucked a bit of each just to be safe.
After trudging so deep into the forest that he could not longer hear his classmates rustling about and calling out to one another, Tristan still had not found anything that looked remotely like wild ginger. He had never gardened before, and his parents were skilled at killing any house plant that crossed their doorsteps. To his unpracticed eyes, everything looked the same—just endless pine trees draped with moss, sometimes with toadstools or small clusters or unidentifiable leaves near the base.
He had forgotten his new watch, so had no idea what time it was, but he probably had to get back to the clearing now. Apart from the unlikely-looking plants he had collected near whatever Amber had harvested, at this rate he would be returning empty-handed.
With a sigh, he scanned the list of plants once more, this time choosing a mushroom to search for. Surely there were only so many toadstools that could be found in one forest.
This time he plucked every mushroom he came across, regardless of color.
When he finally stumbled back out into the clearing, he saw from Rusty’s watch that they had ten minutes left in class. The other students were straggling back—Rusty was empty-handed and covered in mud; petite, curly-haired Cailyn Tyler clutched an armful of pine boughs and long grasses; and Leila looked as though she had actually managed to find a clump of wild ginger.
“What’s that?” Leila demanded of Tristan, eyeing his handful of leaves and mushrooms.
“No idea.”
When Zeke and Amber finally returned with only minutes to spare, Gracewright told the students to sit in a circle in the clearing. “Come up here, one at a time, and we’ll see what you have. You first, Miss Ashton.”
“I’m going to fail this class,” Tristan muttered, noting the odd variety of plants Amber laid out before Professor Gracewright.
“Excellent work,” Gracewright said, checking each plant off her list as Amber laid them on the grass before her. “That’s over half the specimens I assigned—quite impressive.” She smiled at Amber. “Mr. Fairholm, you’re next.”
Tristan reluctantly dropped his handful of plants on the grass before Gracewright.
“Ah,” Gracewright said, picking up each leaf and toadstool one by one. “What were you looking for?”
Tristan’s face felt hot; he heard Damian and Zeke laughing. “Um…I was looking for wild ginger, but I didn’t find any. Then I tried to find a hedgehog mushroom.”
Gracewright plucked one of the mushrooms from the pile. “Well, this is your hedgehog mushroom. That makes one out of twenty.”
As Damian and Zeke guffawed louder still, Gracewright shot them a quelling look. “I do not expect immediate success from any of my students. These exercises are merely a chance for you to start practicing the powers of observation—both of identifiable characteristics that will help you recognize a plant in the wild, and of the great variety of species that lurk in what might look to an unpracticed observer like a uniform forest.”
Tristan hurried back to his place in the circle, his face still burning. He fit the definition of an unpracticed observer perfectly.
He was grateful to find that most of his fellow classmates had done no better. Leila had guessed correctly with her specimen of wild ginger; Finley Glenn had correctly identified five species, besting everyone except Amber; and Eli had gathered what looked like a piece of every single plant in the forest, though only three out of his mound were on the list.
Zeke was the last to come forward. When he deposited his plants on the grass, Gracewright started laughing. “You don’t know a thing about botany, young man, but you’ve spotted the loophole.”
Still chuckling to herself, Gracewright turned to the other students. “You may have guessed this already, but your assignment wasn’t terribly specific. Half of the species on these lists won’t grow around here. Luckily we have our greenhouse for the less adaptable specimens, which Mr. Elwood here managed to break into.” She shook her head in amusement. “Homework—sketch each of the plants you didn’t manage to find. Mr. Elwood and Miss Ashton are both exempt from this—well done, you two.”
Zeke smirked at the others.
“What?” Rusty protested loudly. “How’s that fair?”
Tristan shared his indignation. Was Gracewright trying to encourage them to cheat and steal?
Gracewright turned to Rusty. “One of the first things you should know about magic is that it can’t be restricted by human laws or codes. The only rules that matter are those of nature and power. If you have something else to show me, Mr. Lennox, I’d be happy to look. Otherwise, class dismissed.”
Fuming, Tristan ground the moss he’d collected into mush under one foot. If all of his classes were like this, he would hardly last a few months at the Underground Academy.
“Clovers look a lot like wild ginger, okay?” Rusty said, scowling at Gracewright.
“No, they really don’t,” Leila said.
Shoving his muddy list of plants into his bag, Tristan stalked off toward their next lesson. Maybe if he failed botany, Professor Alldusk would put a good word in for him. If he couldn’t succeed at everything, he could at least excel in one of his classes.