“Welcome,” Instruktanto Miratova announced, “to The Pit.”

It wasn’t anything I’d consider a pit, as such. she’d taken us to a large stone circle, about the size of a block of houses, surrounded by several rows of stone seating, like an amphitheatre. (Although amphitheatres tended to be semicircular, so… a full theatre? Look, you get what I mean.) Here and there, people were seated around the circle, settling on cushions or pulling out snacks, clearly waiting for something to start. The bottom row of stone seating was covered in those metal anti-bird spikes, which I supposed disqualified if as seating; I could just make out some of the complicated designs etched all around that row, like a diagram of something I didn’t understand.

“This is the heart of the Haven,” Instruktanto Miratova continued, which seemed like a pretty steep claim for something so plain-looking. “It is the second most complicated magical apparatus in the entire school. It is, quite literally, seventy three masterpieces.

“What?”

“I mean, seventy three students have qualified as masters by advancing the design of the Pit. It is, in simple terms, a spell trap. During the Initiation, a large volume and variety of spells are released into the Pit, and the initiates enter from this side and simply walk across the room.”

That wasn’t a very long route.

“And a few kids die every year?”

“On average, yes. Sometimes we lose more; sometimes we lose none. The spells tend to distort space quite a bit, so some students might end up walking for miles, or walking in circles. The physical conditions vary, too; students have found themselves walking through an endless desert or flying through space… it’s sort of like being in a dream. Also, the exit is spelled so that only people with a spell can leave. Some students have been known to cross the pace in three or four steps, then have to turn back around and find a spell that will bond with them. All in all, this should be a lot safer for you than the other students – you two will be able to walk out of the exit as soon as you find it, and since you already have a spell, the others won’t try to bond with you.”

“Oh, so it’s a one-spell-per-mage kind of thing?”

“Most of the time, yes. The spells we use are specifically trained that way, and the mix we use for the initiation mostly includes the most cooperative ones. There are a few renegades that… well, it’s complicated, but as a general rule, anything in the Pit isn’t going to want to attach to you if you already have a spell. Otherwise, sending a student in there would be a death sentence as they got mobbed by dozens of spells at once.”

“That makes sense,” I said, trying to ignore the ‘mostly’. “What are those guys on the seats waiting for? The initiation is months away.”

“Probably a sporting or training event,” Instruktanto Miratova said, disinterested. “With a carefully crafted circle, free spells can be used in a trap like this to simulate specific environments and scenarios. It’s a reckless thing to do, but it is quite popular among the student body, and they have developed games using the Pit.”

“It’s a holodeck?” Kylie asked.

“What’s a holodeck?” I asked.

She shot me a pitying look. “Have you ever watched TV in your entire life?”

“It is not really accurate to call it a ‘holodeck’,” Instruktanto Miratova said, “but it is an accurate enough description of the purpose to which these students are going to put it.” She wrinkled her nose.

“And they’re allowed to come and muck around with it?” I asked.

“No, there are teachers who will ‘muck around with it’ for them. I find it frivolous, but to be fair, several of the masterpieces involved in the Pit’s construction were designed specifically to allow it to be used for a wider variety of games, and if that is the sort of motivation people need to advance our understanding of magic then I have little practical grounds to complain. Come along, I must get you back to the initiates’ area.”

“But I wanted to see what they’re going to do.”

“As deeply invested as I am in your amusement and vague sense of curiosity, Kayden, I have several important experiments running right now that I need to check on. And it would be against school policy for me to leave you here unescorted.”

“What if we promise to just sit here quietly and not touch anything?”

“In my experience, teenagers never do that, and if I were going to trust any teenager to do that, the rules would still be against us. Furthermore, if I were going to trust any teenager to do that, it would not be the pair I first met about to die because they were in an area they weren’t supposed to be in. Come along.”

“That was one time,” I mumbled as we followed her out. “You nearly die at the hands of one magical cave lake monster and nobody lets you forget it.”

It was about a twenty minute walk before we saw the blue light ahead. Instruktanto Miratova waved her staff vaguely at the blue corridor, said goodbye, and pushed open a door. The room beyond was like something out of a cartoon – a room of glass tubes and containers in all kinds of weird shapes, full of different liquids, many of them interesting colours. Some of them I recognised – distillation equipment, a microscope, an honest-to-goodness big black cauldron of bright red liquid just sitting in the middle of a mad scientist’s lab for no obvious reason – but most of it was completely mysterious. I just had to see more.

I winked at Kylie, and followed Instruktanto Miratova in.

She didn’t notice me at first. I watched her look into some tubes, and take some complicated notes on some charts I didn’t understand, and then finally go to the cauldron in the middle of the room and turn on the giant hotplate underneath it. She reached into a rack of capped test tubes, each half-full of some kind of very viscous black liquid, and pulled one out. After reading the label carefully, she took the cap off and tossed the whole thing into the cauldron, then cut her thumb on a scalpel and added three drops of her own blood.

Then she looked up, and saw me watching her, and Kylie, lingering uncertainly in the doorway.

“Why are you still here?” she asked.

“You’re escorting us back,” I said innocently. “I didn’t want to be in an unauthorised area without an escort.”

“The initiate corridor is literally five doors away,” she said. “You can see it.”

“Yeah, but as you reminded us earlier, the last time I went just a little bit off the path I nearly died,” I said. Would fluttering my eyelashes innocently be too much? Yeah, that would probably be too much. “So I thought it would be safest to stick to the rules.”

Instruktanto Miratova’s lips pressed together. I could see her calculating whether it was worth leaving her experiment for a couple of minutes just to walk us down a corridor.

“Fine, wise guy,” she said. “Just stay near the door and don’t touch anything. I mean it. Interrupting some of these forcefields mid-experiment will kill you.”

I backed up to stand near the door. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Testing the reactivity of stored ichor using a new storage technique,” she said. “It loses potency quickly once it is outside the body. Generations of mages have been trying to find ways to expand the utility, versatility and safe use of magic by stabilising and empowering ichor, but of course there are trade-offs as no matter what preservation system you use it becomes very difficult to activate once again. We’ve been running small assays for a few weeks on what I think might be the most effective method to date, and if I can get a Berthold reaction out of any of these samples then that should be enough promise to validate a proper trial of – ”

Oh. So this was the sort of person that Max was destined to become.

Once Instruktanto Miratova got going, it seemed rude to interrupt her to ask what “ichor” or “assay” or “Berthold reaction” meant, so I just tried to guess by her tone of voice when the correct moments to nod and look impressed were. Besides, if I asked for the definition of anything, that would probably just result in a new explanation with a lot more words I didn’t understand, and the last thing I wanted to do was go on a verbal, real-life wiki walk in the middle of a cartoonish mad scientist’s lab with a very tired woman gesturing dramatically over a now-bubbling cauldron. I mean, real life didn’t have tabs. How would you keep track?

Done with her explanation, Instruktanto Miratova looked down at the cauldron and frowned. “Mm.”

“No good?” I ventured.

“Can’t be certain, but I’d have expected a reaction by now.” She started circling the cauldron. “If it does work at this point, we’re going to have to redo the preliminary work to double-check the reactivity, because we’re past the point where Berthold rates can be assumed to be linear. Stay there!”

This was in response to me stepping forward to get a better look. I backed up to the door again.

“You like science?” Instruktanto Miratova asked me.

I shrugged. “Not really.”

“Mmm. Well, I’ll just check Tolio’s experiment, and then we can – ”

And that’s when the explosion happened.

There was Kylie, in the doorway, looking ready to leave; me, just inside the door; Instruktanto Miratova, about halfway across the room; and directly behind her, a big, bubbling cauldron. And then, very suddenly, the cauldron wasn’t there; instead, a fiery cloud of bright red liquid and metal shards was rapidly expanding in its place. Kylie grabbed my collar and dragged me into the hallway while Instruktanto Miratova, not even wasting time to turn around and see what it was, threw herself to the ground. The impact of the explosion slammed the door behind us, and inside, Alania Miratova screamed.

I felt the curse rise inside me.

It was like… like the universe itself helping. Invisible force gathered under my feet and propelled me forward; invisible force hit the door at the same time my arms did, nearly tearing it off its hinges; invisible force wrapped itself around my limbs, protecting me from the worst of the flames as I raced through the burning liquid now covering the entire lab, lifted the screaming, burning woman with both arms, and ran with her out into the corridor. As soon as we were clear of the flames, she dropped her staff (which she’d been clutching the whole time), pulled off what was left of her burning robe and dropped to the floor to extinguish the flames on her dressing gown. She was bleeding in several places where metal shards had hit her.

The whole thing had taken about ten seconds. In that time, Kylie had managed to tear one of the lighting crystals from the wall, which she dropped to shatter at her feet; it shattered, and the lights throughout the corridor turned red. About thirty seconds later, during which time I patted out the small fires that had caught on my own clothing, the corridor filled with people clad head-to-toe in brown. And I mean head-to-toe; I saw eyes, and some with bare fingers, and other than that basically no skin. One of them threw a bucket of water on Instruktanto Miratova, extinguishing the last of the fires, then knelt to speak quietly to her.

Maybe it was just the contrast of the fiery room I’d just been in, but the corridor felt suddenly cold. A chill in the air, that was already sinking into my bones.

“Are you alright?” one of the brown-clad figures asked me, in the most neutral tone since Kylie’s prophecy.

“Yeah,” I lied. It was definitely cold. And I felt kind of giddy.

“You have been burned and possibly poisoned. We will take both of you to the kuracar immediately.”

“What about her?” I asked, nodding at Miratova. The world lurched with my nod. Was that mist, filling the corridor, or just my vision? Was that ice, creeping out from around her, spreading along the floor?

“She is too dangerous to be near right now. Come with us.”

“I’m fine,” I insisted. “She – ”

And then I passed out.