I explained mirror runes to Kylie. She nodded, unsurprised.

“Turn off your light,” she said, turning off her own. I obliged.

The cave around us wasn’t perfectly dark. With our tablets out, our eyes quickly adjusted to a light that was faint, but perfectly adequate for making things out. Some patches seemed slightly brighter than others but the patches of brightness kept changing, like extremely subtle television static. I looked at Kylie, and she looked… odd. Flat. Like there was no depth to her.

It took me a moment to realise what, exactly, was wrong. There were no shadows. The light had no source; it was just… there, a feature of the air itself. Somehow. Like… like empowered water, maybe? Empowered air? Was that something that could exist?

Should we be breathing it?!

When I focused, I could feel it sort of tingle against my skin, and I realised what I was looking at. We were submerged in a stream of spells, flowing through the passage. They were dimmer here than they had been during the Initiation, and harder to feel, which was a blessing, as otherwise it would be impossible to feel or see anything else.

“This is so dangerous,” I said. “This is so, so dangerous. No wonder Max didn’t tell us he was doing this. No matter he picked a day when everyone would think he was doing something else. Nobody in earth would’ve heard about this and not tried to stop him. What was he thinking? Why did we follow him here? Where are we?”

“The Pit,” Kylie said. “It has to be the Pit. The real Pit, not the little access platform upstairs that they use for Initiations and competitions. This school has a vast number of spells, and they have to be stored somewhere.”

“Great, so it’s like the Initiation, but a hundred times worse, including the dangerous spells and with no safety protocols and no way out!” I was starting to freak out. I clamped down on that right away. I was good at not freaking out; I’d had years of practice.

At least, I used to be good at it. Maybe it was the trauma or the testosterone or the fact that I wasn’t constantly worried about killing everyone around me if I couldn’t control my emotions any more, but I’d been having a lot more trouble with it lately. Well, that was just going to have to not be true for a while. I needed control right now. I could freak out later.

“Max will have a way out,” I said. “He wouldn’t come down here without an exit strategy, so when we rescue him…”

“When we rescue him from being ‘trapped and blind’, as the prophecy put it,” Kylie finished grimly, “we just have to hope that that refers to some physical situation we can help him out of, and doesn’t mean his exist strategy won’t work and we’re all trapped down here.”

“No sense in freaking out,” I said, talking more to myself than Kylie. “It doesn’t matter, because our next step, no matter what’s going on, is to find Max.” I took a deep breath. Let it out. Focused. “Do we have any ideas whatsoever on how to find Max?”

Kylie shrugged. “It’s a straight passage. We can go left, or right.”

“Well, you’re the prophet. Pick one?”

“Uhh… left?”

We went left. I searched my hastily packed emergency bag, digging past snacks, my first aid kit, and a multi tool I’d felt so organised buying awhile ago and had never used, in order to find a pen in the bottom. I flipped to a clean page in Max’s notebook to record our progress. Just because we were already lost didn’t mean there was any reason to get… I don’t know, double lost.

I did my best to ignore the miasma of loose spells around us. Tried not to think about how one of these things had found me as a baby, burrowed into my heart and altered the entire course of my life. Tried not to think about how a dangerous or rogue one could burrow into one of us at any moment and quite possibly kill us. Either it would or it wouldn’t happen, and there was absolutely nothing that we could do about it, so we just kept walking.

The passage forked ahead. Our pick of tunnel was probably going to be random, but I took a peek down each anyway, just to see if there were any obvious clues that one was better. What I saw down each was… more tunnel. But there was something interesting.

“Kylie. Come here. You feel that?”

“Feel what?”

“The… spells. You can feel them moving through you, right? Doesn’t it seem like they’re slower down this tunnel? Or… less?”

“… Yeah. Hard to tell, but I think maybe the light’s a bit dimmer, too?”

“So we have a strong current or a weak current. Which is better, do you think?”

“Less spells has to be safer, right? The fewer spells, the less chance something nasty will get us.”

“.. Yeah.” We headed down the passage with a weaker current.

We continued walking for some time. At forks, we’d usually take random directions, although we’d avoid anything that looked too narrow or had too strong a spell current. I was fairly sure that the corridors down here wouldn’t teleport us around – I didn’t know much about spell theory, but I was pretty sure that the giant runes housing Refujeyo’s unused spells would have to be as solid and unchanging and foolproof as possible – so with the map I was drawing, we’d always be able to backtrack if we needed to. Eventually, Kylie piped up, “How long do you think it’s been since you saw Max?”

“Um, not since the party this morning.” I checked the time on my tablet, which fortunately ticked along just fine without intranet access. “So probably seven-ish hours?”

“Me, too. We’re probably going to be okay, then, if we can find him.”

“We… are?”

“Yes. He probably rushed off to find this place right after the party, right? Having set things up so everyone would assume he was doing something else and wouldn’t question not seeing him. And it took us, what, an hour, an hour and a half to get down here? So we can assume that he was well and truly down here before we got that message from Alania.”

“And…?”

“And my prophecy said nothing about it until after. It doesn’t prophesy until there’s a reasonable chance of danger, and it has something to say about what that danger is. Meaning that just ending up down here didn’t doom him; he’s got an exit strategy that probably does work. He got into trouble after that.”

“That’s good news,” I said, “but it means he’s been in that trouble for over two hours now. Are we… I mean… can your prophecy tell you when someone’s dead?”

“No. It gives the prophecy of danger, and then it’s silent.”

“Well, that’s…” Nothing we could do anything about. “We should walk faster.”

“Yeah.”

As my map started to fill out, I wasn’t at all surprised to find that it resembled the shape of runes. Trying to identify them was probably a waste of time; the chances that I’d know enough to make sense of the whole pattern were basically nil, and even if I did, we’d die of dehydration before we’d paced that many corridors. We sat down to rest a moment, and pore over what we had.

“The prophecy said he moves to the ‘centre of truth’,” Kylie pointed out. “If this place is the ‘truth’ he was looking for, then we should head for the middle. Do we… know where the middle is?”

“Complicated runic inscriptions like this are normally circular,” I said. “What we have so far is just kind of a mass of lines, but it’s probably going to be a whole lot of concentric circles with power flowing around and around them. If we can determine the curvature, then we can head inward, like spokes on a wheel. They’re going to… the power is going to try to flow in circles, and flow less between circles, so if we follow the strongest currents for a while that should take us through the base structures of runes in a single circle. Then we can see which way it’s curving.”

“Okay,” Kylie said. “But I’m going to have a snack and rest up first.”

Good idea. We’d been walking for ages, and we couldn’t help Max if we collapsed. I sipped some water and rested against the cave wall.

“With the amount of times we seem to get stranded places,” I mused, “we should probably pack some proper survival kits and just start carrying them everywhere.”

“We definitely should have prepared better for this one,” Kylie said. She took a vicious bite out a muesli bar and chewed like it had personally offended her. “My spell’s being really quiet, you’ll be happy to know. I’ve been learning to sense its activity, and it’s completely dead right now. So we’re not in any immediate, right-now danger.”

“Would you even be able to tell, in all this?” I asked, gesturing to the magical maelstrom around us.

“Hmm… good point. On that note, are you feeling okay?”

“Me? Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well, y’know. Emotion or exertion might not wake up your spell, but with this much magic around… is it… safe?”

“I… have no idea.” Magic had not been on the list of things I’d been cautioned to avoid growing up. Aside from the few commercially available mild potions, magic had been in the hands of mages, safely kept away already, or in the curse in my heart, dormant and waiting. I’d never considered the possibility that one might affect the other. “That… can’t be dangerous, can it? I mean, someone would’ve warned me. We’re at a magic school.”

“Yeah. You’re probably right.”

I tried not to think about Cheryl, catching fire. I tried not to think about how if that happened to me, down here, there was nothing that Kylie would be able to do to save me.

Eventually, we moved on. We traced enough of the paths to be pretty confident about the direction of the curve of the circle, turned ninety degrees from the circular path, and headed inward.

If I was right about the general shape of the labyrinth, then as we headed inward, we should pass through several concentric circles of runes, with most of the spells running along the main skeleton of the runes and rushing around the circles, and smaller, weaker currents on the outer strokes. Meaning that on our path, the number of spells in the air should drop, then increase again as we passed through the next circle, then drop again, continuing until we got to… whatever was at the centre, I supposed. Hopefully Max. The prophecy had said ‘he moves to the centre of truth’, so I was hoping he’d actually made it there and would be easy to find, but it was possible he’d become trapped or incapacitated on the journey, meaning we’d still have to search for him. But the middle was a much better starting place for a search than the random hall we’d arrived in.

We walked, and as expected, the currents grew weaker and the spells started to thin out. They were still everywhere and dangerous, but I found myself relaxing, anyway. Spells moved in little swirling eddies around us, brushing against our skin, almost curious, reminding me of the Initiation.

“Hey, Kylie?”

“Mmm?”

“Why do you think the Evil Eye called this place the ‘labyrinth of dreams’?”

Kylie didn’t respond. I spun around; she wasn’t there. There was nowhere for her to have gone! We were walking down a straight corridor, with no turns for a long time, in the sunshine –

The what?

The sun shone overhead in a clear, blue sky. Somewhere, I could hear birdsong. I could probably find the birds, if I just climbed the cliff walls of this long, narrow valley I was standing in. Had I been here before? It was so familiar… or at least, made of vaguely familiar pieces.

Oh. I’d been here during my Initiation.

In a version of this place with a lot less spells and a lot more safety precautions.

Well, fuck.