FORT SLIPPED INTO HIS ROOM, closing the door as slowly as he could so he wouldn’t wake Gabriel. Without the light from the hall, he had to carefully pick his way around the other boy’s bed to his own, but he wasn’t going to chance switching on a lamp. It’d taken him what felt like hours to get back from the kitchen, avoiding the guards and cameras as best he could. Now, he just wanted to hide in bed for a few days and process everything that had happened.
He successfully made it to his bed without stubbing a toe or whacking his shin, which was maybe his biggest victory of the night. Now he could just lie there in silence for a minute and think about what had—
“How’d the plan go?”
Fort bolted straight up, panic exploding in his brain before he realized it was just Gabriel. “You’re awake?” he whispered, trying to calm back down.
“I’m talking to you, aren’t I?” Gabriel said as Fort’s eyes adjusted enough to see his roommate sitting up in bed now. “I think it’s safe to assume I’m awake, yes. So? How was it?”
“We were just hanging out, like I said at dinner,” Fort told him. “That’s it. Nothing exciting.”
“You don’t have to tell me what’s going on, Forsythe,” Gabriel said, lying back down. “But don’t lie to me either. There’s no need. Just say you don’t want to talk about it.”
Fort felt warmth slowly run up his face. “Okay, sorry. Yeah, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fair enough,” Gabriel said, staring up at the ceiling. “So did you get caught?”
Fort groaned. “You just said that if I didn’t want to tell you—”
“I didn’t say I’d stop asking,” Gabriel told him. “Were you stealing one of these amulets?” He tapped his chain that was now sitting on the nightstand. “Do they have ones that do cool things, unlike this one? If there are some that turn back time, I’m going to go steal one myself.”
“We weren’t stealing amulets,” Fort said, his embarrassment now setting his face on fire.
“So what were you stealing?”
“Nothing! No stealing. Can we just go to bed?”
“I did go to bed,” Gabriel pointed out. “You’re the one who snuck out after curfew. Don’t worry about that, though. I’ll tell them you were here the whole night if they ask.”
For a moment, that actually seemed nice of him. And then Fort remembered how many soldiers had seen him and Sierra in the hallways. Well, Sierra in Dr. Opps’s body, at least. “You, uh, shouldn’t do that,” he said. “Just… it’s fine. They won’t ask. Nothing happened.”
“Sounds like it,” Gabriel said.
“Gabriel?” Fort said after a moment of silence.
“Yeah, kid?”
“You can call me Fort. Forsythe was my grandfather’s name. Just… just call me Fort.”
“Sure, kid. Fort.”
Fort lay back, dreading any further questions, but when none came, he slowly started to relax and go back over everything they’d done that evening.
Rachel wasn’t going to forgive him any time soon, if ever. Neither would Jia. Cyrus might, but that was more because he was just that easygoing, not because Fort deserved forgiveness.
And was Sierra okay? He’d tried calling her name several times on the way back to his room but eventually had given up, worrying that she was trying to hide or something and couldn’t be distracted. Mostly he wished he had some way of getting news about the outside world down here in the school. There was the room with the computers and the TVs, where he’d first seen Sierra and Damian labeled as terrorists, but that had been filled with soldiers and wasn’t really a place he could just wander in and crank up the volume to hear what was happening.
Of course, he could have used a teleportation circle to find out what was going on. Maybe even go to the airport and try to rescue her and Damian?
Of course, Damian could teleport himself, except that the Old Ones would be watching for it. And even if Fort got away with it, he had no idea where they were. Or which airport they were at. Or what it looked like. Or if he’d get caught by the same agents.
Okay, maybe it made sense to just wait for Sierra to get back to him. If he found out later that Colonel Charles had captured her, he could find a way to rescue her at that point. At least he knew that they wouldn’t hurt her, considering how much Colonel Charles wanted the power of Mind magic.
Or had wanted it, before Sierra’s powers had gone crazy in his office. What had that been? How did her Mind magic work on physical objects? Even if there were spells like that, where had they come from? Had she…
Ugh, none of these thoughts were helping. He was just going to make himself more anxious, if he kept up with questions he couldn’t answer. Besides, he had enough to worry about, with mastering teleportation.
Everything he’d heard about mastering spells at the last school told him he’d need about a week. He’d done it faster at the time, but that had been because Sierra had cheated and stolen spells from other students’ minds for him without realizing she was doing it.
So he’d need to get through another week or so of school, with Colonel Charles and Dr. Opps both now on high alert from what they probably thought of as Sierra’s attack. Not to mention that he was seen by the guards and the security cameras with Dr. Opps after Colonel Charles had been knocked out, so they’d for sure be questioning him soon.
He’d just have to tell Colonel Charles that Sierra had taken over his mind again, like she had at the last school, but now he had no memory of it. It’d be a pretty terrible excuse anywhere else but here, but it wasn’t like they could call his bluff.
Either way, he just had to last a week, and then he’d be on to the next spell, which had to be something interdimensional. The anger he felt at finding the wrong spell returned, and he clenched his fists, knowing he could have had his father back home by now if whoever wrote the book had just put the magic in the right order.
And then there was the matter of lying to his friends. They would have understood, if everything had gone to plan, and he brought his dad back right away. But now things were just going to fester, making everything worse.
But he couldn’t let them risk themselves. He just couldn’t, not for him. Not again. He couldn’t be to blame again for anyone getting hurt, not after failing his dad on the National Mall.
Fort sighed quietly and rolled over onto his side. Sleep was going to be impossible, that was one thing he knew for sure. His mind was just too wound up to let him—
Lighting erupted all around him, like a thunderstorm had struck his bedroom.
“Whoa!” he shouted as the energy sizzled just a few feet from him. He leaped off his bed in surprise, and the bed disappeared behind him, as did Gabriel and the rest of the bedroom. Instead of the school’s ugly green walls, Fort now found himself surrounded by crystal tubes with bolts of lightning passing through them at random, illuminating the area as they passed.
The tubes were built in and around a carefully carved stone cave, pushing in and out of the stone, flowing off in all different directions. Without meaning to, Fort slowly floated along one row of tubes, leading toward what looked like a sort of gate made out of lightning.
As he drew closer, Fort realized that whatever had ahold of him wasn’t going to stop, and he threw up his arms to protect himself from the lightning… only for a hand from behind him to reach out, palm facing the lightning. The electrical energy seemed to part in midstream, turning back on itself, and opening a path through the gate.
Fort tried to turn around to see who it was behind him, but he couldn’t move, frozen in place by whatever force was moving him along. Was this another dream? Or was it more like what he’d seen when Sierra was asleep, her memories coming to life around him?
Any thought of what was happening was thrown from his mind when Fort saw what was up ahead. A huge pit opened wide before him, circled every ten to twenty feet down with buildings made from crystal, with gold and silver roofs. Lightning shone off of everything as it crackled through the tubes that now led into the city, and his mouth dropped open at the sheer beauty of it all.
Here and there he could see movement, something that looked vaguely like people, but he couldn’t see what they were from this distance, especially with just the lightning to see by. There were no other lights in the city, though something seemed to glow in the center of the pit, rising up from the middle of the circles of buildings. It almost looked like a statue made of diamond, but all Fort could see was the very top, and he couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be.
And then a roar shook the cavern, and somehow the city in the pit morphed into a darkened abyss, just as large, but less deep. Even in this strange place, he recognized that roar, he knew that roar by heart. He’d heard it first on the National Mall, and then again below the Oppenheimer School, as well as in far too many nightmares.
One of the monsters roared again in the darkness below him, and huge red eyes opened, staring up at him. Fort heard the sound of claws digging into rock just seconds before the red eyes came straight for him, flying far too fast to avoid.
Fort screamed in terror, knowing there was nothing he could do. The last time he’d faced one of these creatures, he had his magic, his advanced Healing spells that caused pain, but now he was completely defenseless, with no magic except for one teleportation spell. And if he cast that, he’d lose the book of Summoning forever. But if he didn’t, and this thing ate him—
Massive jaws opened wide and swallowed him whole, the creature’s teeth slamming shut behind him. Only now, they weren’t teeth, but instead had morphed into stone stalactites, closing off the entrance to a tunnel Fort now found himself in.
Some light shone in from behind those stone teeth, illuminating the sides of the tunnel, if only barely. A hot wind came from the other end of the tunnel, and Fort felt himself drawn in that direction, floating again against his will.
He could hear something happening down at the other end of the tunnel. There were voices, one that sounded human, and the other…
He shuddered just hearing it. It sounded like… it felt like the voice of an Old One.
He flew faster now, completely out of control of his body, but for some reason, he wasn’t surprised by that. Nothing surprised him here, in fact, even if plenty of it terrified him. That was enough to prove this was all a dream, even if it didn’t matter, because somehow it was also real. It was happening… or had happened already, to someone if not him.
The voices grew louder as he moved, and a strange reflected light began to illuminate the tunnel from that end. Fort emerged into a room that extended far beyond his sight, easily larger than a football stadium, with a rock ceiling so tall that he could barely make it out above him.
And the whole room was filled with gold.
Nuggets of gold, like something you could mine from the ground, were piled everywhere. The mounds of gold were enormous, many threatening to topple over at any moment as nuggets tumbled down from the heights every few seconds.
“Please!” he heard a voice say, and Fort’s heart stopped as he instantly recognized his father. “I don’t know what you want, but—”
“YOU HAVE NO POWER, HUMAN,” the other voice said, reverberating in Fort’s chest from its force. This voice was different from the Old One with the tentacles, though, which erupted in his mind. Whatever this creature was, it was speaking out loud, though that didn’t make it any less horrible. “HOW DID YOU LOSE YOUR MAGIC?”
Fort began to float up alongside the nearest pile of gold, rising to the level of the voices. For now the mounds still blocked his view, but in moments he’d be high enough to see.
“Magic?” his father said. “What… what are you talking about?”
The horrific voice began to laugh, and Fort tried to cover his ears but couldn’t. It was inescapable, that laughter, and it soon began to echo in his mind, changing into something more familiar, into words—
IF YOU WISH TO HAVE YOUR KIN RETURNED, YOU WILL TELL US WHERE TO FIND THE LAST DRAGON.
As the tentacled Old One roared in his mind, Fort shouted in pain, only to bolt up in bed, the scream dying in his throat. He was back in his room, and it had all been a dream. But he’d seen his father! Had that really happened? Was it a memory somehow?
Was the Old One showing him where his father was so Fort would do as it asked, revealing where this last dragon was, whatever that meant? Maybe it wanted the dragon skeletons in the school?
Gabriel leaned into the room from the bathroom, a toothbrush sticking out of his mouth. “Whoa, you okay?” he said. “You were screaming for a second there.”
“Just a… a nightmare,” Fort said, trying to keep his hands from shaking. “Is… it morning already?”
Gabriel gave him a sympathetic look. “Yeah, it is,” he said. “And I get it. I’ve been having weird dreams too. This place brings ’em out, I think.” He reached over and grabbed one of Fort’s uniforms from the bureau, then tossed it at him. “Come on, get dressed. They’ll hassle me all day if I show up to breakfast without you.”
His roommate popped back into the bathroom, and Fort sighed, picking up his uniform. He felt like he’d gotten no sleep at all, which wasn’t surprising given what he’d been dreaming about.
Maybe breakfast would help, though. If nothing else, today couldn’t go any worse than yesterday had.
He quickly got dressed, then opened the door to find a man and a woman in dark suits waiting for him. “Fitzgerald?” one asked.
“Um,” Fort said, completely panicking.
“Right, this is him,” the other said, grabbing Fort’s arm. “Come with us. Agent Cole would like a word.”