I had a new bodyguard the next day; a young woman wearing a voluminous pink skirt that, I couldn’t help notice, could easily conceal a gun. I considered giving her the slip again, just to be petty, but if these people were here for my safety then I should probably play along, so Melissa, Chelsea and I pretended not to notice the stranger who kept showing up in the same locations as us and never seemed to buy anything.

The idea that I might need protecting was worrying. I’d resigned myself to being a bit of a curiosity until the novelty wore off, but even I knew enough about magic to know that the whole human familiar thing wasn’t important in any practical way. It was interesting because it was a rare and dangerous accomplishment, not because it was useful. If anything, the complete lack of knowledge of how stable the familiarity bond was and the distinct possibility that it might kill me or Kylie at any point made me a much less useful familiar than the animals that mages had been using for thousands of years. It might be politically useful and potentially scientifically interesting, but that was it.

I took comfort in the fact that Sekura Refujeyo clearly hadn’t sent top-notch agents to look over me. Melissa had spotted Henry on day 1, and he hadn’t been all that hard for me to lose, so this couldn’t be his normal job. I’d seen sekkie kids in pit comps who could’ve run rings around me if I tried to give them the slip, even in my hometown, so I knew Sekura Refujeyo had better. That they hadn’t sent them probably meant that I wasn’t in any serious danger; that the agents were supposed to be more a declaration of intent, a warning to anyone else that I was under protection, than an actual force that might have to protect me.

Unless they were a distraction, and there were more skilled agents who –

No. I wasn’t getting caught in that kind of thought spiral. I was going to hang out with my friends, and catch up with my family, and enjoy my fucking holiday.

But it was only a few hours before Melissa pressed, “So, why exactly do you have a bodyguard?”

“Is it because of the curse thing?” Chelsea asked. “if they’re still hounding you because they think your curse is going to go beserk and kill someone I swear – ”

“No, that’s… not a problem any more.” Not for that specific reason, anyway, probably.

“Good. Because they were supposed to teach you to control it, right? That’s the deal you made. So if they are hounding you and treating you like a criminal over it – ”

“They’re not. It’s fine.”

“Good.”

“Then why the bodyguard?” Melissa asked.

I shrugged. “It’s not important.”

“Uh-huh. I’m sure it’s a complementary service offered to all students of mage schools, right?” She battered her eyelashes sarcastically, which wasn’t something I’d previously known people could do.

“Well, we are a very fancy school,” I deflected half-heartedly. But both girls were looking at me, and I could feel my resolve melting away. Chelsea and Melissa were older now, different, just like I was, but they were still Chelsea and Melissa. The three of us had never had secrets from each other. We’d always been there for each other, and shared everything. What had I been thinking, trying to pretend nothing was happening? That I could keep my two lives neatly separate, keep them frozen in time as childhood friends providing a neat escape from my new life? That was ludicrous. If we were going to stay best friends, we had to accept who each other were now. I couldn’t hide myself from them and stay close. I couldn’t have it both ways.

I sighed. “There’s… some stuff going on,” I admitted.

“You don’t say,” Melissa said mildly.

“Yeah. But it’s kind of complicated. And not really something I can discuss in public.”

“Melissa’s house, then,” Chelsea said decisively, grabbing for one of my wrists while Melissa grabbed the other. I pulled out of their grip reflexively, but let them link arms with me and steer me to Melissa’s home – the closest thing I had to a home, with my old house sold – to talk.

I score them to secrecy, of course, and collected my thoughts. The real question was where to start. I started with the nature of curses, mostly because I resented the fact that I didn’t want to explain curses, and that alone took about twenty minutes while the pair got their outrage out threatening every mage they’d ever heard of and generally condemning the world at large while I had to desperately explain that no, they couldn’t just announce this on their youtube channel, no matter how much it seemed like it might help other cursed people in the short term. I pointed out that youtube had been around for awhile and somehow nobody else had turned this into big news, and it seemed like a bad idea to try to make a thing of it and find out why. I’m not sure they were convinced, but they had already promised secrecy, and eventually stopped grumbling.

Then I moved onto the actually infuriating stuff.

Covering everything took hours, because they kept interrupting with questions and I’d have to backtrack over something I’d forgotten that nemaganti wouldn’t know. But eventually, we got through everything important. The Pit. The Labyrinth of Dreams. The familiarity mark. Kylie’s most recent prophecy, every word still burned clearly into my mind.

“Well,” Chelsea said. “Fuck.”

“And you weren’t going to tell us this?” Melissa demanded. “You were just going to, what, pretend none of this existed for two weeks?”

“Well, yeah. There’s nothing you guys can do to help.”

“You don’t know that! You might need our help, and if we didn’t know, where would you be then?”

“Liss, we’re talking about an underground school in a secret location you couldn’t possibly even get – ”

“Oh, that’s no problem,” Chelsea said brightly. “You were working on finding the location of the school, right? You just have to stay out of trouble until you’ve got that done.”

Oh yeah. I’d forgotten about that. “I’m not great at staying out of trouble,” I admitted.

“Clearly,” Melissa said drily.

“Can I see it?” Chelsea asked. “The familiar thing?”

I hiked up my sleeve to show them.

“Hmm. It just looks like a normal mage tattoo to me.”

“No, it doesn’t – aren’t those usually white?”

“Yeah, you’re right. So this is what might have killed you, huh?”

“It still might,” I admitted. “It seems to be safe, but we’re not sure why. Nobody can figure out why I’m not dead yet.”

“You don’t sound scared.”

I shrugged. “The curse has been a time bomb my whole life, and honestly, this feels less dangerous. I don’t feel any magic from my curse; I never have. It’s just there, ready to either wake up or not. But the Evil Eye… I can feel the magic flowing around me, making room for me. So I know it’s flowing in harmony with me.”

“So you don’t think it’s dangerous?”

“No more dangerous than my own heart or appendix or nervous system. Any system can fail and maybe kill you, but I don’t think this is any more dangerous than the body systems I was born with. We just don’t know why.”

“Maybe you’re just the luckiest guy in the world?”

“Ah, yes. That sure describes me. Lucky.”

“Hey, you’ve survived everything up to now, right? Lucky.”

“It’s hard to argue with that, I suppose.”

“Anyway,” Melissa said, “you need to keep us updated about this kind of stuff. Write more often.”

“I can’t. I mean, I can write, I guess, but I’m not supposed to talk about a lot of this. I don’t think our letters are monitored, but they might be.”

“Then we’ll use code,” Chelsea said.

“I don’t think any code we could come up with would beat – ”

“A one-time pad,” Melissa suggested.

Chelsea shook her head. “Too restrictive and too obviously a code. Shaka, when the walls fell.”

“That might work!”

“What in the world,” I cut in, “are you two talking about?”

“Kayden, I am literally begging you to watch Star Trek.”

“I can’t. We don’t have TV at school.”

“Lame.”

“Chelsea means,” Melissa said, “that a communication system built on cultural references is basically incomprehensible to someone who can’t understand those references. We have fourteen years of shared memories that no one else knows to build whatever ‘code’ we want. It’d be vague, but unbreakable, and not suspicious if we do it right.”

“Aw yeah!” Chelsea punched the air. “Secret spy codes! Let’s get to work!”

I opened my mouth to ask if I got a say in this, decided I didn’t want to know the answer, and closed it again. By the standards of my life, none of this qualified as weird.

I didn’t have too much faith in whatever Chelsea and Melissa kludged together as a ‘code’, but the conversation quickly turned to reminiscing about old times anyway. I’d seen the girls several times a week for my entire life up until a year ago, so there was a lot to reminisce about. None of us were too worried about getting pulled off topic so often; there was no such thing as wasted time with old friends.

The holiday passed quickly; too quickly. It seemed like no time at all before I was giving Chelsea, Melissa and my parents parting gifts (healing potions I’d made, mostly to have solid proof for my parents that the school they’d been so reluctant to send me to was actually useful), hugging everyone goodbye, and climbing into Cooper’s van.

“Have a good holiday?” he asked as we pulled out of the motel parking lot.

“Mmm,” I replied. I wasn’t sure how much Cooper knew about the whole ‘school being a giant runic circle’ thing, and too tired to be mad at him even if he did. I’d been able to ignore the weary, drawn feeling that had been dogging me all fortnight while I distracted myself with seeing family and old friends, but now that I was heading back to school, I just wanted to sleep.

I didn’t, though. I kept my eyes on the road ahead. At some point, the van was going to teleport to bring us near to Kylie or Max, and I was going to see it happen this time, damn it.

“How was your holiday?” I asked, mostly to keep the conversation going.

Instruktanto Cooper laughed hollowly. “I don’t think I’ve had a proper holiday in years. You’d think that having an area with such a low population to oversee wouldn’t be a lot of work, but since the new amendments passed letting us approach younger cursed people, I’ve been swamped with recruiting students.”

“So there’s going to be a bunch of new initiates from Oceana this year, then?”

“Well, no. More than usual, certainly, but our numbers are already low. Your semester having three is fairly typical – was fairly typical. We’re looking in the range of six or seven this semester, I think.”

“Oh, wow. Soon we’ll be taking over the school.” I rubbed at my eyes, and that, of course, was the moment we were suddenly out of my town and in the desert. I knew before I even looked back up that it had happened, because I felt a sudden surge of energy, a relaxation of something inside me I hadn’t even noticed I’d been holding tense, as the magic of Kylie’s spell rushed through me and washed away the tense fatigue I’d been getting used to. Giddy with the feeling that everything was right, that I was whole, that I could relax, I couldn’t help but grin like an idiot as Kylie climbed into the van, wearing an identical expression. She pulled me into a brief hug, which was about as much physical affection as I’d ever seen her give anyone, before sitting down.

“So how was your holiday?” I asked her.

“Good.” She shrugged. “It was good to see my family again.” She brushed her fingers against the mage mark on her face.

“And does it being the first holiday with that make things easier or…?”

“Well, it’s… some of my family are kind of traditional, and it’s not…”

“Not how they do things?”

“Yeah. But.” She shrugged again. “Honestly I can’t wait to graduate. I can’t stand being away from them for so long.”

I nodded, although I couldn’t say I felt the same. It was great to see my family and old friends, but I’d hardly say I couldn’t stand the absence.

“Kayden. We need to start thinking about…” she gestured at my arm.

“Yeah. I know.” Being apart had sucked.

“a couple of weeks, we can stand. But when we do graduate…”

“That won’t be for year. They’ll probably have figured out how to separate us by then.”

“And if they haven’t?”

“Then, again, it won’t be for years. We have plenty of time to figure something out. And there’s no point getting all stressed about future problems this early when there’s every chance they won’t come up, is there?”

She smiled thinly. “They might, though.”

“They might.”

“I can’t leave my family. I can’t.”

“I know. I wouldn’t ask you to.”

“But somehow I doubt you’d be happy coming out to live – ”

“No need to worry about it yet. We have years, and – ”

“And maybe they’ll find a way to separate us by then, yes, you said.”

The van had stopped again. Max climbed in, collapsed into his seat, and pressed his palms against his eyes. Kylie and I stared at him.

“How, um… how was your holiday?” I managed to ask after several seconds of stunned silence and shared incredulous looks with Kylie.

“Exhausting. But over. School is relaxing compared to that madhouse.”

“School might be a bit stressful this term, though, right?” Kylie managed, in a surprisingly neutral tone. “What with everything going on.”

“Yes, I suppose so. But we can handle it.” He lowered his hands and caught a look at our faces. “What? What is it?”

I tried to wrestle my face into a neutral expression. “You’re right,” I said. “No problems.”

“Kayden and I were the subject of everyone’s curiosity in our initiate year,” Kylie agreed, eyes not leaving Max’s face. “Because we were witches. I’m sure the curiosity over this familiar thing will die off too.”

Max sighed. “It’s the goatee, isn’t it?”

“Why do yo have a goatee?!” I asked, at the exact moment that Kylie exclaimed, “You look like a Disney villain!”

“It’s a classic style,” Max grumbled, worriedly stroking his new goatee in an unvillainous way.

“To be fair, it suits you,” I said, just as the van pulled to a stop.

“We’re here,” Instruktanto Cooper announced.

And we stepped out into the valley, and then into the secret underground halls of Skolala Refujeyo.