“How do you think they make all the water?” I asked Saina one morning as we hiked alongside a river on our way to meet Hammond and Peter.

She glanced at the river, then at me. “Uh… I think it comes from the mountain? From… melting snow, or something?”

“Not that water. The empowered water. I’ve been looking into potions and stuff – you know, as a potential career – and just about everyone buys their empowered water from Refujeyo. You can make it yourself, but it takes so much time and energy that it’s not worth it. Everyone says that, someone in Refujeyo has some kind of industrial process that they’re not sharing, but I can’t find any record of who they are or any hints at all about what the process might involve.”

“It’s a very well-kept secret.”

“They must be so rich.”

Saina nodded. “Which means they’re probably someone involved in the actua money management of Refujeyo. We have our own currency and there isn’t enough of it around for any random person to really hide that kind of wealth in a useful way. People managing the financial system would’ve noticed, so either they’re protecting their identity, or the process is owned by someone in the financial system.”

Huh. I hadn’t considered that. “So… someone high-ranking in Politikala Refujeyo?”

“They don’t necessarily have to be high-raking, but… most likely, yes.”

“And it’s been going n for generations, so someone from a politically important family who’s high-ranking in Politikala Refujeyo.” I shot her a sly look.

“Well, yeah, that’s – Kayden! My mother is not the secret owner of an empowered water manufacturing process!”

“You will tell me aaaall the seeeecrets,” I said, wiggling my fingers.

Saina giggled. “I guarantee she’s too busy for that kind of thing.”

“Oh, I know. I think everyone’s looking at this the wrong way. I don’t think there is such a process.”

“What do you mean?”

I kicked a stone into the river, watched it disappear under the water, and kept walking. “There’s a giant lake of empowered water on campus.”

Saina rolled her eyes. “I don’t know who’s told you nonsense like that, but – ”

“I’ve seen it. I’ve been in it. The teachers know about it. I could probably find it again and show you, if you wanted. Big lake, fed by all these little underground streams, and some kind of monster lives in there – no, I swear I am not making this up. I figure, okay, weird way to store empowered water… but that’s just it. It is a weird way to store empowered water. If you’ve gone to the trouble of making the stuff, wouldn’t you put it in tanks or something? Keep it clean and contained?”

“Yeah, but if they didn’t… wait. You think it’s already there? A natural resource?”

I grinned. “Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“No! Empowered water isn’t just… lying around! It’s man-made!”

“Says who? Sure, we can make it, but who says it can’t be found naturally? We can make a lot of stuff that’s found naturally. Think about it – the school used to be in Duniyasar, right, back at the beginning? From the look of that place, a lot of effort went into turning it into a school, and it looks like they left long before they ran out of room. Who relocates an entire school to the middle of a mountain on a whim? Why build the Pit there? Yes, I know they wanted secrecy, but they’re already in the middle of the desert.. Duniyasar has air and sunlight and a portal system easily monitored and observed from the building itself; Refujeyo, by nature of its design, has to have external portals everywhere that are impossible to monitor, so even if the location of the school itself is a secret, it’s covered in indefensible entrances that anyone could find. You can’t tell me it’s a security thing. And can you imagine the effort of carving all of those tunnels? Of setting up lighting and plumbing and ventilation inside a massive tunnel network? That’s not something you do with no reason! But if you found an abundant source of something difficult and expensive to make that everyone wanted…”

“Then why put a school on top of it?” Saina asked. “Why not just set up an outpost with some workers and pumps? It’s not like any of us are helping them harvest the water.”

“I… don’t know,” I admitted.

“Guys!” Hammond, up ahead, waved at us. His dark bowl cut was covered by a jaunty sunhat, and his bright red robes looked like a sheet hung out to dry, draped over his large, almost rectangular frame. He had accessorised with a cloth belt patterned with sunflowers.

We rushed over. “Where’s Peter?” I asked, and before Hammond could answer, our fourth teammate’s head breached the surface of the river, ginger locks plastered to his wet cheeks.

“Great,” he said, “we’re all here. Everyone’s doing alright?”

I shrugged. “What’s up?”

He grinned. “The Lunanti are looking for opponents for a mountain relay. Four people per team, ten kilometers, event’s in three weeks.”

Two and a half k’s per runner wasn’t bad, but… “Up a mountain?” I asked.

“Yep. The Pit generates the mountain a little differently each time, so it’s impossible to completely prepare in advance. We’ll get a map and thirty minutes to decide where to put our people and plan our route up. Runners can go in any order and at any distance apart we like, taking any route up the mountain we like, so long as one’s at the starting line, they all carry the baton, and we get it over the finish line ten kilometres away.”

“Up the mountain.”

“Yep.”

“Ugh. We have a lot of training to do, then.”

“So you’re in?”

“Of course I’m in. Saina?”

“Naturally. Is this why you’ve brought us to the base of this mountain?”

“Yep! Let’s get fit!”

The last time I’d had to walk for a really long time through tricky terrain, I’d been jazzed up on the passive magic of thousands of spells in the air around me. In the outside world, keeping up energy was quite a bit harder. (It didn’t help that I was so far from Kylie, still in the tunnels of the school, so I was almost devoid of her magic. I knew from experience that it would take a few days of separation for that to become really irritating, but even short term, it made me feel more fatigued than I really was.) I could pace a route and had a good sense of direction but quickly fell behind Saina and Hammond when it came to speed or endurance. But as we’d expected, I was the best climber, which would probably come in handy for a relay up a mountain.

Saina had the greatest speed in the rocky, uneven terrain, while Hammond was basically a tank; he could shoulder a weight and trudge at a steady pace basically forever. Peter was the slowest and tired the most quickly of any of us, but he could swim like a fish and had a fair bit of combat experience by now; not useful in the upcoming competition, perhaps, but it would be for other events.

The most valuable thing I learned was that we should schedule team training sessions more carefully, because I got back to my room with aching legs and ready to fall into bed half an hour before runecrafting class.

Uuuuugh.

I lay down and considered just skipping it. I could skip them all. I could fail the class and retake it next semester; actually, failing all of my classes forever would be best for everyone. For as long as I was a student, I had a fair bit of protection against anyone else who might want to use me for political or scientific gain, so the safe, responsible thing to do was go to sleep and blow off all my classes. Yeah.

I wasn’t going to do that, of course. Tempting as it was for the moment, I had no intention of spending my entire life in a cave network filled with kids. And trying to do so would cause problems for Max and Kylie, especially if we hadn’t figured out how to undo the familiarity link before Kylie graduated. With a groan, I forced myself onto my tired, aching feet and started to get ready for class just as Kylie came in.

“Oh, Kayden, there you are. Lydia wants to do another prophecy lesson.”

“Right now? I have a class, but I can skip…”

“Nono, go to class. I can go by myself.”

“Are you sure? It’s just runes. I can come and – ”

“Be bored out of your mind? It’s fine.”

“I know you don’t like being alone with new people. It’s no problem for – ”

“What is it with you lately? You don’t have to be my bodyguard.”

“I’m not anyone’s bodyguard.”

“Then what’s with this overprotective streak?”

“I’m not overprotective.”

“Sure you aren’t.”

“Well, forgive me if every time I turn my back on someone for five minutes they nearly die!”

“Oh, come on, that’s – ”

“You could’ve died so easily down there in the labyrinth. You realise that, right? I don’t just mean from the familiarity thing, I mean… we were talking, when you fell. The Destiny was spewing its cryptic bullshit and you fell and started seizing and it was the scariest moment of my life.”

“Scarier than when Cheryl caught fire in front of us?”

“Yes! You were dying right there and I had no idea what to do! But it’s scarier than that, because afterwards, I thought… five minutes ago, I’d been in an entirely different part of the cave. Max was absorbed in his bone analysis and I was off discovering stuff and if you’d fallen then, we… might not have noticed until it was too late to do anything. It was a big cave, and you could have died, right there in the room with us, without us noticing.”

Kylie looked pretty spooked by this, but she just took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and said, “I could have. Anyone can have a heart attack or seizure or stroke or whatever at any time, and die without help. But I didn’t. This doesn’t only happen to me; the first day we met, you nearly drowned, and if I’d been a minute slower finding you, you would have.”

“That’s my point! I’m not saying it’s just you, I just… look. Look at Max. The whole reason we ended up down there last semester was because we were such shitty friends that we didn’t notice he was uncovering a massive secret architectural conspiracy!”

“He was actively hiding it from us.”

“He shouldn’t have been able to! Not easily! He was researching it in this room! He had maps and notebooks and, and enough books to literally break his desk – he was openly fighting with Alania and apparently I didn’t care enough to find the real cause! If I’d been paying the slightest bit of attention – ”

“That’s not your job! What is it with you and always taking on everyone else’s business? You’re his friend, not his father.”

“That’s not… I don’t mean I… Look. Any time we leave each other alone for too long, something seems to show up and – ”

“Well, that’s not true. We’re alone all the time. This is the first time I’ve seen you today, and we’re both alive.”

“Yeah, for now.”

“And we’ll still be alive at the end of the day. I promise I’m going to meet with Lydia, and you should go to your class, and we’ll see each other later with nothing dramatic and game-changing to talk about because nothing exciting will have happened to either of us in the other’s absence. Alright?”

“… Fine.”

“Have fun learning about magic squiggles.” She left.

Reluctantly, I got back to preparing for runecrafting class. I should’ve been more insistent about going with her. At least during her prophecy lesson, I could have taken a nap.