The Quantum Games(The Alchemists Academy)

Chapter 20





Wirt turned to stare at the headmaster, and as he did so, Alana and Spencer did the same. Ender Paine looked completely different to any way Wirt had seen him look before. He looked almost… shaken by something. Ms. Lake stood by his side, one hand on his shoulder in an apparent gesture of comfort. Why would Ms. Lake comfort the headmaster? Why would he allow it?

Ms. Lake murmured something and the hedges around Wirt gave way, receding into the lawn so that in a matter of seconds there was no sign that they had ever been there. Wirt kept staring up.

“The Quantum Games are over?” he said, echoing the headmaster’s words.

Ender Paine nodded. “Both you and Spencer Bentley hereby have places in the elite class. We will need both of you, if what Vivaine tells me is…” he shook his head, apparently unable to go on. Wirt couldn’t believe that. The headmaster was normally as emotionless and uncaring as a rock. He turned to Ms. Lake. “Tell them.”


“There has been an attack,” Ms. Lake said.

Wirt didn’t understand. They all knew about the attack. They’d been there when Roland had done it, and it had made no difference then, so why should it now?

“A series of attacks, in fact,” Ms. Lake continued. “Attacks on the rulers and heirs of many of the Hundred Kingdoms. Attacks on some of the foremost magical minds in the realms. Attacks that all seem to have had something in common. This school.”

She paused, looking around the assembled crowd of parents and students. “It is with great regret that I have to inform you that large numbers of our former students are dead, but I’m afraid the news is worse than that. Approximately half of our current elite class is also dead. I know many of you here have friends or family in that class. I am sorry for your losses.”

Ms. Lake bowed her head for a moment and Ender Paine looked up. Now, Wirt understood the pain on his face. The Alchemists Academy was the only thing he cared about, and at a stroke, someone had done more damage to it than it was possible to believe. For him, it wouldn’t be about the individual students -Wirt doubted that the headmaster could even begin to understand that kind of pain- but he would feel the damage to the school.

“Someone will pay for this,” Ender Paine said softly, and the words carried across the field. “I promise you that. Someone will pay.”

“Ender.” Ms. Lake said it softly, her hand on his shoulder again. “Come inside. Come on. You shouldn’t stay here.”

That was almost the hardest part of it, Wirt thought afterwards. Ender Paine was normally so terrifying, even if it was occasionally a ludicrous kind of terror. Now though, Ms. Lake led him back inside the school like a parent leading a child, and he let her do it. That, more than anything, brought home the sheer scale of the blow.

People drifted off in ones and twos, looking for answers or explanations, seeing that the entertainment was over or trying to work out what was happening. There was a sense of things slowly falling apart, and of no one being truly in charge. The attack by Roland had been bad enough, but this? This meant something else entirely.

And at the heart of it, the three of them stood for a long time. Finally, Alana threw her arms around Wirt’s neck.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for not doing it. For not throwing your quantum ball. I don’t know what I would have done…”

Wirt could see the way Spencer was looking at them, and he gently disengaged Alana’s arms from him. “It’s all right. I’m just glad I didn’t do it, Spencer.”

“Me too,” the other boy admitted, and then Alana went to him, kissing him. Wirt tried to push down the hurt he felt in that moment.

Alana pulled back from Spencer and then, to probably everyone’s surprise, including her own, she slapped him. “Don’t you ever do anything that stupid for me again, Spencer Bentley. I couldn’t have stood to lose you. Either of you. What if you’d been killed? What if you’d killed Wirt?”

Spencer looked like Alana had hit him a lot harder than she had, and Wirt could guess why. The same reason that his own guts were tying themselves in excited knots. Alana cared about him as much as she did about Spencer? He had to say something. He had to. Yet how could he, there and then, in front of the friend he had only just narrowly avoided having to kill?

“How did you even get into the maze?” Spencer asked Alana.

“I… I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Ms. Burns asked me to follow her, and the next thing I remember, I was walking through it.”

Ms. Burns. Wirt remembered looking for her in the stand, but she hadn’t been there. What kind of game was she playing here? She’d refused to answer that so many times, but now… now it felt like it mattered more than anything. So much was happening around the school, that if she knew something…

What? How would someone like Wirt ever get answers from someone like her? He couldn’t do anything to make her tell him. Yet at the same time, it seemed so vital that he should find out, because this wasn’t just the usual politics of their mad, impossible school anymore. People were dying, apparently in ways that suggested something was attacking the school.

It wasn’t just the school though. Roland had been aiming to kill both him and Spencer. Whatever force had pushed at them in the test had been trying to achieve the same thing, only more subtly. Was Ms. Burns a part of that? Wirt didn’t know, but when something wanted him, his closest friend, and the girl he… and Alana dead, he was going to find out.

“Promise me you won’t do anything so foolish again,” Alana said to Spencer, but she glanced at Wirt too. “Now, I should go look for Priscilla. After everything that’s happened, I want to keep an eye on her.”

She walked off, and Wirt watched her go. Spencer watched her too, but Wirt could see the way his friend’s eyes flickered over to him. He could see the flicker of anger there. Maybe what had almost happened in the Quantum Games wasn’t just because of some kind of malign influence. Wirt knew he needed to say something. He needed to talk to Spencer. He needed to talk to Alana.

He needed to let her know that he still felt the way he always had about her. He needed to make her see just how much he cared about her. Spencer turned and walked off, following Alana, obviously not looking happy. Wirt knew though that if he used transportation magic, he could get to her before his friend did. He could whisk her away to a spot where Spencer wouldn’t find them, and they could talk properly, without…

A hand touched him lightly on the arm and Wirt spun, his hands coming up to cast defensive magic. He breathed a sigh of relief as he saw that it was Ms. Lake. How had the teacher gotten behind him? Wirt knew better than to ask that. She was almost as good with transportation magic as he was.

“I would suggest that you don’t react so quickly,” Ms. Lake said with a gentle smile that didn’t quite erase the troubled look in her eyes, “but perhaps in the times we face, that kind of response will keep you alive. Something obviously wants you dead.”

Wirt swallowed nervously at the thought of that. “I guessed that.”

Ms. Lake’s smile became a little more genuine. “I knew that you would. That’s part of what makes you special, you know.”

“I thought that was the magic?”

Ms. Lake shook her head. “Oh, there are those who will say that, and it is a powerful gift, but why should someone praise you for a simple accident of birth? It is like being strong, or handsome, or born into the right family. The things you do aren’t just based on that though. Take the way you distracted Roland. How many other students would have dared to interrupt a magical battle like that?”

“How is Roland?” Wirt asked.

Ms. Lake’s expression tightened a little. “As well as can be expected under the circumstances.”

“What does that mean?”

Ms. Lake shook her head. “That’s the thing about this life, Wirt. You don’t get a right to all the answers, and there are things that sometimes you never learn. You just have to do the best with the situation as it is.” She brushed a strand of dark hair out of her eyes. “Though I’ll admit that this particular situation is going to take a lot of dealing with.”

They both stood there like that for a moment or two, and Wirt found that there was a question he needed to hear an answer to more than he’d thought.


“Is the headmaster… will he be all right?”

Ms. Lake smiled. “You know, I don’t think anyone else in the history of this school has ever thought to ask that about Ender. Mostly with good reason. The answer is that I’m not sure. My guess is that this will harden into something like anger in him, but it could do other things too. He loves this school, Wirt. Whatever else is true, believe that.”

“And you love him.” Wirt said it without thinking, instantly regretting it, but knowing he had to go on. “You’re closer than anyone to him, and the way you were with him after what happened…”

Ms. Lake shook her head. “Maybe once. Ender and I have a lot of history, but with the ways magic can keep people alive, everyone here has a lot of history. Let’s just say that I’ve known him when he’s been a better man. And a worse one.”

“Worse than he is now?” Wirt said. Believing that took some effort.

“Oh, much worse,” Ms. Lake said. She sighed. “We all have our regrets, Wirt. Sometimes though, they come back to haunt us.”

Wirt looked at her. “Is that what this is?” he asked. “Something coming back to haunt the school?”

Ms. Lake smiled. “Remember what I said about not always getting the answers? Sometimes, it’s about not having the answers in the first place. Like Alana. I’m not sure even she knows how she feels right now.”

She’d seen that? Wirt hesitated. Of course she’d seen that. Ms. Lake saw a lot more around the school than most people gave her credit for.

“Now,” Ms. Lake continued, “I didn’t come here for that. I came here because it occurred to me that, in the excitement, no one would have done something very important.”

She pressed her hands together, murmured something, and slowly drew them apart. Between them hung a brightly colored scarf, which she held out to Wirt.

“Welcome to the elite class, Wirt Newton. You’ve worked hard for it, and you deserve it.” She smiled almost sadly. “I just hope that it proves to be a happier time for you than it seems that it might be. But let’s not think about that. The important thing is that you’re in.”

Wirt took the scarf and wrapped it around his neck. Ms. Lake was right. Whatever was going to happen, the important thing was that he’d made it. He was in the elite class. He was going to stay at the school and find out what exactly was this destiny everyone knew he had.



*****************

Wirt, Spencer, Alana, Priscilla, and Robert’s Adventures continue in:



The Year of the Elite

Alchemists Academy Book 4





EXCERPT FROM

RISE OF THE FIRE TAMER

Wordwick Games #1

by

kalin gow





Prologue



The deadline slipped past, as deadlines tend to. Around the world, hungry eyes pinned themselves to computer screens, waiting for news. When it came, it came in the form of a simple video file, which when opened showed the familiar head and shoulders of Henry Word, the owner of Wordwick Inc. As heads went, it was not too bad. Although he had hit forty, there weren’t any signs of gray in the sandy-blond hair, and the cleft chin was still as defined as ever. In the second or two before he started speaking, there was a twinkle in the green eyes that said that Henry Word was enjoying the suspense.

“Well,” he began, “you’re probably all waiting with baited breath for me to announce the winners of the Wordwick Games Contest, designed to find our ultimate fans. After all, you probably want to know who’s getting the prize of spending a week in the castle you all know and love from the game.” A mischievous smile flickered across his features for a moment. “Well, simply telling you would hardly be much fun, would it? Instead, I think I’ll keep you all in suspense just a little while longer, and our winners…” Henry Word raised a remarkably old-fashioned pocket watch to eye level and spun it like a carnival hypnotist. “Well, our winners should be finding out very soon indeed.”



TUMBLEWEED didn’t twist its way across the ranch, because that would have been too much like something happening. Stieg Sparks had learned many things in the past seventeen years, and one of them was that nothing much ever seemed to happen on days when you really wanted them to. Particularly not on his parents’ ranch. A few cattle, though not as many as there once had been, stood and stared at Sparks as he sat on the front porch, and he stared back, more for something to do than from any particular interest in them.

The cows were probably getting the better end of the deal, since underneath his sandy-blond hair Sparks had the casual good looks that came with being his school football team’s star quarterback, while cows were just cows.

Of course, Sparks knew could probably find something to do, if he set his mind to it. He could do most things once he set his mind to them. He could, for example, go and take a look at the broken crop sprayer that his father had sworn would never work again, before they ended up paying out more money the ranch didn’t have. He would probably find a way to get it working. Or he could go inside and log on to the Game, though his mother had started to say he was spending too much time on it.

He could even hurry over to football practice. It was certainly what he was supposed to be doing. He might even make it in time not to earn any extra laps from the coach, if he really rushed. Somehow, the thought didn’t spur him to action. In fact, put like that, even staring at cows seemed better.

It occurred to him that they weren’t staring back at him any more. Instead, they were busy watching a figure that had somehow managed to walk halfway up the drive to the house without Sparks noticing. Sparks couldn’t blame them. The figure wore what could only be described as a robe, the cowl up and obscuring their face. Sparks was so surprised by the arrival that he didn’t say anything until the figure was just a couple of feet away.

“Hi. Are you lost?”

In answer, the hooded figure held out a hand. It took Sparks a moment to notice that there was an envelope in it. Sparks took it without thinking. It was an odd kind of envelope, jet-black and sealed in a very old-fashioned way, with a blob of red wax that had a seal pressed into it. The seal formed a capital W. A very familiar capital W, since Sparks had seen it online practically every day for months now.

He ripped it open and read the contents in one go, then looked up to ask the hooded figure about it. Sparks found himself staring at empty space. Well, not exactly empty. There were still the cows. There were always cows. There just seemed to be a complete lack of any gray robed figures to go with them.





THIS apartment was a lot smaller than any ranch, and there certainly was not room for any cows, except possibly in the refrigerator. There was hardly space for Rio, his little brother and his grandmother. Sometimes, especially when his grandmother started saying things like “Riordan Roberts! What trouble have you got yourself into this time?” he thought that there might not even be enough room for all three of them.

Or at least not for him. The dark hair and olive skin he’d inherited from his mother were fine with his grandmother, but the piercing blue eyes he’d got from his father weren’t so ok. Not after what happened. It didn’t strike Rio as very fair that she’d bring it up whenever there was trouble, especially when it was never Rio’s fault. Well, not most of the time, anyway. It certainly was not down to him that practically everything in East LA seemed to be trouble in Nana’s opinion. As far as Rio could see, taking a few things for Nana and Tomas shouldn’t really count. He was only looking out for them.


Currently, he was sitting in front of about the only luxury the apartment had, a tiny computer that Nana had insisted the two of them should have for their schoolwork. For once, Rio was using it for just that, and not the Game. He looked up at the sound of soft footfalls behind him, expecting to see Tomas. It was not.

“Hey, who are you?”

The figure in gray didn’t say anything, and Rio lunged forward to try and wrench the hood of the robe back. If someone was going to break in, he wanted to see their face. He got a brief glimpse of a face almost completely hidden by wraparound sunglasses, before the robe pulled out of his hands, leaving Rio trying to keep his balance and failing. He looked up from the carpet, and the figure was gone. All that was left was a black envelope left precisely on the floor in front of him like the figure had known where he would fall.

It occurred to Rio that, in Grams’ book, this would definitely count as trouble.





SOMEWHERE in the blare of music that was her bedroom, Kat was taking a lot of trouble over her appearance. Her hair was already right, or at least it was a chin length bob of dark hair with streaks of blue and red that her parents tried very carefully not to disapprove of, but the rest of it hadn’t been easy. There had been the red and black plaid to pick out to go with her combat boots, along with exactly the right amount of black makeup. It had taken ages to get right. The makeup aged her a year older than her sixteen years, but didn’t help fill out her slim figure. She had even cut short her session on the Game to work on it more.

Let’s see Them think I’m ordinary now, Kat thought. She always thought of her parents as Them, especially when they insisted on calling her Katherine instead of Kat, which they did a lot. They seemed to have evolved a policy of ignoring the more extreme things Kat did, in the hopes that eventually she would fit in, or that she would become the Katherine Kipling they wanted her to be. Well fat chance.

Kat surveyed the results of her efforts in her bedroom mirror. Despite her Dark Girl outfit, she still looked like a pixie or what people think pixies should look like, the child-like Tinker Bell version. An independent observer might have suspected that black eye shadow, and black nail polish, and black lipstick was probably overdoing things a bit, or was at least a look better suited to someone tall and brooding, not petite and, frankly, cute. Kat loved it.

She was so busy admiring it that she almost didn’t notice the reflection of the gray cloaked figure- the one who laid an envelope on the edge of the dressing table but vanished the moment she looked round. It could almost have been a dream, except that the envelope was there, sitting rather smugly, Kat thought, as though it knew exactly how worrying its sudden appearance was.

Still, Kat recovered enough to think after a moment, at least the black went with her nail polish.



UP in Jackson Zusak’s home in Alaska, things were a little brighter, mostly because his parents insisted on filling the place with the color that the cold tended to leach away outside. Some days, he could hardly get to his computer for the brightly colored throws and coverings that his mom kept leaving around the place.

He was not at his computer now, for once. Instead, he was sitting in an armchair busy reading a book on the history of the Vikings. That had amused his mom and dad when they had seen it before heading off to the store to buy groceries.

“You could be a Viking yourself,” Jack’s mom had said. “You’ve got the red hair.”

They had all laughed at that, because even Jack knew that the image of his small, scrawny figure setting sail across vast oceans just didn’t work. Besides, they didn’t have glasses back then, and a Viking who wandered into things, as Jack tended to do when he lost his, probably wouldn’t do very well.

“You’re only fifteen,” his mom had said, hugging him. “You’ve still got time to grow to be Viking-sized.”

Jack hadn’t pointed out that, because people tended to be shorter in the past, he was probably already Viking-sized, for much the same reason that he didn’t tell his dad the answers to the crossword before he’d officially given up on it. Thinking of which…

Jack found the newspaper in its usual crumpled up heap, smoothed it out a little, and finished off the crossword in a couple of minutes before returning to his book. He’d forgotten to mark his place, and it had closed on the arm of the chair he’d been sitting in. He went to open it again, and almost dropped it when the black envelope fell out. Out of the window, Jack got a brief glimpse of a gray robed figure, hurrying away too quickly to catch.





GEMMA James caught the sound of the doorbell just as she was finishing an assignment for her private school. She was pretty sure she’d aced it. She thought about ignoring the disturbance to go through it once more, but then remembered that there was not anyone else home in her family’s Manhattan house. It might be a delivery, and since her dad was a lawyer, there was every chance that it might be something important that she would need to sign for, assuming that they’d take a sixteen-year-old’s signature.

Sighing, Gem stood up and made her way through the place’s expensive furnishings, pausing automatically to check her appearance in the hall mirror. It was one of those habits she had picked up from cheerleading, because you never knew when the universe might have found ways to make you look a mess. As usual, she looked perfect, not a hair of her long blonde hair out of place as it framed a face with porcelain skin and deep green eyes. She smoothed out her skirt, then checked the door’s spy hole, because appearance was not the only time you couldn’t be too careful.

There was not anyone there. Or rather, there was not anyone standing at the door. There was someone walking away, dressed in the kind of robe that didn’t make sense unless Franciscan monks had started making deliveries, but he was gone in a second or two. Gem waited a moment longer before opening the door. She looked around, and found no one there, so she looked down. When she saw the envelope, she smiled very slowly, because some moments deserved to be drawn out, then she picked it up, ripped it open and read it so quickly that it probably set some kind of record.