A palm caught in the dip between my shoulders and pushed me pancake flat into the rock.
“Ow.” I scrambled to get my big toe tip curled atop another even tinier hold; cheek flat against stone, magic rebounding painfully.
“Try not to die,” Axer said, hand leaving my back, already looking up and mapping out the next twenty holds—as good at climbing as he was all things physical.
The mountain towered so far overhead with juts and overhangs that I couldn't even see the top through my spelled lenses.
“I think we are still doing this the hard way,” I said, mouth moving over too-smooth rock.
“Yes, flipping universe space would be easier,” Axer mused.
“I know!”
He looked down at me.
“It would be,” I said.
He hid a smile, poorly.
“Con poured super grip glop on my fingers to keep me attached to this blasted rock, and this still sucks.”
I pushed with my toes and extended my hand upward, pinching my fingers around a small bit of rock. “Neph would be good at this.” With her shimmying, graceful moves, and super strong legs. And better height. “My fingers are made for gripping pencils.”
Guard Rock, secured in my backpack, jabbed me with the tip of his. He extended it upward as if to signal that I was moving too slowly.
“Why can't you climb, and I can ride in your backpack for once?” I said to him, knowing he’d hear, as Constantine had stuck a small tag on him, too, at the last minute.
He jabbed me again.
“We aren't even using ropes. Because we are all mad. Do you really want to jab me again?”
He did. This time purely for amusement.
“I should have just strapped you to my back,” Constantine said, still climbing, but staying closer to me like he did every time there was a slip. “Like a pocket fairy.”
“You aren't funny.” I pulled myself up another two feet, undulating upward while hugging the mountain’s face. “And I'll totally do that. At the next landing. I have duct tape in my bag. The good kind. You can call me whatever you want.”
I rotated my body to grab a series of three more pinches. Both boys doubled my distance. Then tripled it as a series of cracks were the only holds available to me in between the easy ones they could reach without problem. I stared at the paper-thin fissure that my lenses were helpfully highlighting—a spelled addition courtesy of Constantine and based on some popular mountain climbing frequency.
I would need to stick the tiniest tips of my fingers into those fissures—areas that they'd both been able to skip entirely with their greater reaches.
“Come on, Ren. We have to make the lower cliff edge in the next forty minutes.”
I pressed my cheek against the hard stone. “Just...just leave me here. This is the end.”
“Killed by shortness.”
“You will pay,” I said, lips against the stone.
“Tallness does not become you.” And now his amusement fully drowned even his lingering resignation.
“So much paying.”
*
We took a break on a ledge near the top so that Axer could attach small devices that would help Dagfinn keep track of movements inside. I let my legs dangle over the side and tried not to think about what awaited us at the top.
“Someone is making me magically taller before we get to the crux.”
“The crux of this climb is no harder than the other five you had to do that we didn't,” Constantine said.
“I hope your fingers get stuck in a fissure,” I said.
“Harsh.”
I smiled unwillingly, rubbing at my wrist.
Constantine immediately retrieved a stoppered bottle from his coat. He took my wrist in his hand and dripped a drop on top of the cuff. It sizzled and spread along the material, nullifying the burgeoning magic and making what was underneath even more painful. I winced.
He looked sharply at me.
“It’s fine,” I said.
His lips tightened. “It’s not fine.”
“Con, I almost died like twelve times on this rock and haven't used magic. I won’t use it to save myself.”
“That’s not—” He took a deep breath. “You never use it to save yourself,” he said grimly.
He looked at Axer, who was steadily looking back. Axer tipped his head in response. “We’ll figure out an alternative next time.”
The pain got worse every inch nearer to the top.
I watched the null cuffs glint on their wrists and the magic that neither could use flit under their skin. Their magic was also stoppered beneath the field that Constantine had created by combining our shield-field with a sliver of the null field surrounding Corpus Sun.
As soon as we pulled ourselves over the edge of the last overhang, the castle loomed up through the dark clouds.
Lightning crackled around it—feeding off the energy inside as well as the forces without.
“Okay, not forbidding at all,” I muttered, shaking off the cramps that had started to build.
Rock Guard hunched into position, ready to spring.
I had seen pictures of the facility, so I knew that even though the sanitarium was supposed to be a place of healing and holding, it was a creepy castle in the middle of nowhere. It held a lot more of the “holding” feeling than one of “healing.”
If Excelsine were a lovely and strange mountain in the middle of Europa, this was its opposite—a fortress of rock and stone positioned above Siberian desolation.
There was no time to scrutinize the desolate view, though. Axer was pulling out containers and Constantine was withdrawing vials. A drop of sweat rolled from my hairline down my cheek. I looked at my cuff and the time, then took a container of magic and slid it beneath my belt.
Constantine handed me a vial, and I upended the contents on my crown. The magic slid down, connecting with the container. Only then did three more containers join the first—combining to make my magical signature a mixture of the three mages whose identities I was assuming. They had been carefully chosen to ensure access to any part of the compound—a technician, an enforcer, and a console assistant. The boys each had the same combination of disparate identities. Patrick—or rather, Patrick's family—had provided them.
How they had gotten the magic, I didn't want to know.
Constantine affixed another small circle of magic beneath my ear, and as if my thought on Patrick, instead of Constantine’s pre-made magic, had connected the others into our closed communication loop, Dagfinn said, “You are certain the identities are solid?”
“Are you questioning the illicit deeds of my illustrious family?” Patrick asked idly.
“No. But the sneak only works once.”
“Then the three of them better use it well.”
The Three Man Sneak involved assuming the identities of people already at the target destination—for us, the employees at the Sanitarium who had the access we needed. With magic involved, it made the whole ruse a lot trickier, but Patrick had given us ID pods to switch identities as we went.