We waited. Water rose.

“How did you know I needed help?” I asked. I eyed my tablet, still glowing in her bag. “Do those things have trackers in them or something?”

“Oh, yeah, of course. If you don’t turn your location off, other people can find you on the map. But we’re off the map here.”

“Oh. Then…?”

“I used this. Hang on.” She fished out her own tablet and played an audio file.

The voice was Kylie’s, except it wasn’t. Her aboriginal accent was gone, replaced with… something Scottish or Irish, something like that. She spoke in confident, measured tones, with no trace of shyness or defensive sarcasm. The words were clear, but not easy to make out, because syllables weren’t stressed or emphasised correctly; they were spoken in one monotonous string of sound.

“South of spire Heartbound walks

‘Til path gone from his soles.

Drowned and mired, Heartbound falls

Before the next bell tolls.”

“That’s… you?”

“No. That’s the Evil Eye.”

“The what?”

She tapped the witch mark on her face. “The Evil Eye of Prophecy. I was born with it. It speaks misfortunes into existence.” She glanced at me sidelong. “I’m sorry it got you like this.”

“You think your curse caused all this?”

She shrugged.

“Kylie, I don’t think your curse summoned a monster-filled flooding cave into existence. You’d never have survived bearing the curse if it was that powerful.”

“Maybe not, but did you intend to end up in a monster-filled flooding cave?”

I opened my mouth to answer. Then thought about it.

In hindsight, some of the decisions I’d made to end up there had been pretty dumb. They did seem like the sorts of decisions I’d make, but had I made them alone, or just assumed I had?

“My mum used to think like you,” Kylie said. “Nobody wants to hear that their own child is evil, I guess.”

“You’re not evil. The curse is evil.”

She shrugged again.

“What do you mean, she used to think like me?”

“She thought the curse didn’t hurt people. She thought it just warned us of danger. It’d speak of a storm, and we’d have time to bring in the animals and bunker down. So did the curse bring a storm to hurt us, or warn us of a storm to help us? Mum and my uncle used to argue about that a lot. He thought I should’ve been given away as soon as I was born with it, but she wouldn’t hear of it. It told us of a lot of little misfortunes; people getting lost or sick or in accidents, stuff like that. Once, my uncle got bitten by a snake while out alone. If the curse hadn’t warned us, he would’ve died. Nobody listened to him after that.”

“That sounds pretty useful. How did you end up here?”

“It killed four people.”

“Oh. I’m… sorry to hear that.”

“We were at the beach. There was this little island… well, this little cluster of rocks… a little way out. I was relaxing on the shore when the Eye took hold and told us Mantu, my brother, was out on the island and about to fall and hurt himself. So some of the men took a boat out to save him.”

“And they failed?”

“You could say that. A storm sprang up out of nowhere and took the boat down. The men didn’t make it. And then Mantu walks in with some groceries and asks what’s going on.”

“He wasn’t even on the island?”

Kylie shook her head. “He’d just gone to the store. The Eye had lied to us! We didn’t even know it could do that! It hadn’t spoken a storm up, but it must have known it was coming and sent those men into it to die. After all those years of it sometimes helping and sometimes making things worse, letting us think every time things got worse that it was our fault for not acting fast enough, this was an act of war. It lulled us into false security and then used it to kill my family. And that meant it was way smarter, way more deliberately evil, than we’d thought. I couldn’t stay at home any longer. It was too dangerous.”

“But you know it wasn’t your fault, right?”

“That don’t matter. The people I loved were in danger, so I took away the danger. Being born with the Eye wasn’t my fault, but it was our choice to listen to it. If we hadn’t listened, this danger wouldn’t have happened. We knew it was evil, and we let it trick us.”

“If you hadn’t listened to it, your uncle would have died of snakebite.”

Kylie didn’t meet my eye. She watched the rising water.

“And I’d be dead, too,” I continued.

“We’ll both be dead when that water gets high enough.”

“No, we won’t. We’re gonna swim to safety, and it’ll be great.” I looked down at the water myself. Five, maybe ten minutes. I tried not to let myself panic – panic might wake my curse. My curse could kill Kylie.

“Why did you come looking for me?” I asked.

“You heard the prophecy. Was I supposed to let you drown?”

“You just said the Evil Eye is a liar. It sent people out to save your brother and killed them. You don’t even like me, but you risked your own life to come out and save me.” I shook my head. “That’s idiotically brave.”

She laughed. “They can put that on my tombstone.”

“You’re not going to die.” I wished she’d stop talking about death. It made it hard to keep my emotions under control. “And you still haven’t answered my question.”

“I didn’t realise this was the Personal Question Hour.”

“You’re seriously not going to tell me?”

“No, I’m not, because the reason why is almost as stupid as you ending up here in the first place.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s pretty stupid.”

I shifted on the rock ledge. My legs were starting to fall asleep; I couldn’t let that happen. I’d need them to swim.

“Well?” Kyle asked.

“Well, what?”

“Forget your promise already? ‘Tell me how you ended up here and I’ll tell you how I ended up here’. That’s what you said, right?”

“As I remember it, you said ‘no’ to that deal,” I said, just to be difficult. But what else were we going to do? Stare at the water and wait in silence?

“Mine is less dramatic than yours,” I admitted after a moment. “But it’s more… well, it’s not a case of listening or not listening. I don’t have any control when it activates; there’s nothing I can do to make it harmless. And it nearly killed someone.”

“Who?”

“This guy from my school. One day I lost control and – hey, is that a light?”

“Way to change the subject.”

“No, seriously. Cover the tablet light.”

There was a light! It emanated from the tunnel we were trying to reach; white, and growing brighter. It wasn’t long before its source walked into view.

She was middle-aged, with greying hair pulled back into a plait and a no-nonsense expression. Her violet robes were wide-sleeved and flowed down her body dramatically, like a mage from a storybook. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the fact that she’d hemmed them high enough to keep out of the rocks and dirt, revealing leather workboots underneath. The light came from the fist-sized crystal on the end of her gnarled wooden staff. Its soft glow glanced off the still water below us, flecks of metal in the cave walls, and… something else.

There was something on her shoulder. Something I couldn’t see, really, except for the light catching on its surface, like clean glass.

“So,” she said. “You two took all the water.”

“We didn’t mean to!” I called back.

“Sorry!” Kylie added.

The woman whirled her staff over her head and brought it down. Pointing the crystal at the water. “Vries!”

The thing on her shoulder moved. With a shimmer of light it was gone then it hit the water with a loud crack; ice spread from the point of impact. I could almost make out the shape of the thing swimming toward us by the ice forming around it. It hit the wall below us with a soft thump, leaving a wide path of ice.

I stared.

I’d seen magic before, of course. Well, I’d seen the occasional mage at a career day hide a big object in a small box, or my GP Doctor Marley absent-mindedly reheat his tea in his hands. But whatever this woman had done was more like something out of an action movie.

The woman was waiting impatiently. I eyed the path. It looked solid enough, if I ignored the way the water bubbled and steamed at its edges. Kylie dropped down onto it and seemed fine; I followed suit.

By the time we got to shore, the shimmer was back over the woman’s shoulder. She crossed her arms and glared at us.

“Do you have any idea the complexity of the experiments you just interrupted?”

“Sorry.”

“I see that you can both walk. Neither of you are currently dying?”

“I don’t… think so.”

“I feel fine.”

“Good. Follow me then, please.” She turned and strode away.

We rushed to catch up. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“To the medical ward, naturally. Kuracar Malas will want to look the both of you over in case of hidden injuries that need treatment. Do you realise how much danger the two of you were in?”

“Yes,” Kylie said.

“Good. Then hold onto the memory and perhaps it will advise you not to repeat this sort of thing.” We walked into the blue light of a school corridor, and with a wave of the woman’s hand, the light in her crystal faded. It was replaced by a series of arcane symbols floating around the crystal’s surface.

I squinted at the thing on her shoulder. It was so much harder to make out in the school lighting. It looked about the size of a cat, but that was all I could really tell about it.

“Your serveyanto is Taine Cooper, correct?” the woman asked.

“Is he?”

“He will receive a strongly worded letter over this incident, as will your parents.” She waved her hand; the arcane symbols in her staff crystal moved. No, not arcane symbols – letters and icons. She was using the crystal like a tablet. “Ah, here we are! You, there!”

Somebody was in the hall ahead of us. Like our rescuer, he wore traditional wizard’s robes; unlike her, he wore them in a neutral grey colour, cut too close to his body to flow and without any dramatic shimmer to the cloth. He started at her voice, and spun on his heel. It was Max.

“Yes, Instruktanto?”

“Are you busy at this present moment?”

“N… no, Instruktanto.”

“Then I would consider it a favour if you would escort these two to the medical ward without delay. I have been away from my experiments for too long, excuse me.”

She strode off back down the hall.

Max stared at us. I glanced at Kylie, shaking and covered in little scrapes, and tried to figure out how to stand to look as little soaking wet and generally battered as possible.

“What did you two do?” Max asked.

“Flooding monster lake,” Kylie shrugged.

“Nothing important,” I said.

Max looked at the floor. I followed his gaze.

“I know that looks bad, but it’s mostly not blood,” I said. “The lighting makes it look darker than it is. It’s just a trail of water with a little bit of blood in it. It’s perfectly fine.”

“Alania Miratova didn’t seem to think it was just fine! Did you see how angry she was?!”

“Who?”

“Who? Who?! Do the two of you pay no attention to politics at all?!”

“I mean, I know who the Prime Minister – ”

Max waved a hand. “No, real politics, not commonfolk play-acting. I can’t believe you two; you’ve been here less than one day and – ugh, the medical ward is this way.”

He strode off down the corridor. We followed.

Hey, at least we weren’t dead.