CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

When Dr. Michel asked if I’d done anything to help Number Five wake from his coma, I gave her my best ‘Eurian Perfect’ smile and lied through my teeth. Going so far as to joke that my mere presence might have had a healing effect on Number Five’s brain. This got a weak laugh out of my friend, but Dr. Michel was a harder audience to please.

She raised an eyebrow at me before her gaze drifted to my bag which I clutched to my chest out of instinct.

You’re looking way too guilty dumbass…

Dr. Michel didn’t press the issue though. Probably because I did just save my friend’s life — allegedly. So, instead of a reprimand and unwarranted search of my bag, Dr. Michel opted to send me out into the hallway while she and the nurse who’d just arrived in the room could examine Number Five’s condition.

“That was amazing!” Allers said as soon as we were in the hallway and out of earshot of the nursing staff. “What the Hel did you put in these vials?”

“I call it FHP.”

Corporal Allers greedily eyed the vial I put in his palm. Seriously, I could almost see the Euran signs superimposed on each of his eyeballs.

“What does the acronym stand for?”

“Fortify Health Potion.”

His gaze shifted to me.

“You sure you don’t want to change the name?”

I frowned. “What’s wrong with the name?”

I’d become pretty touchy about my supposed lack of naming sense, something Number Five and Number Three liked to tease me for. I mean, sure, ‘Blood Bullet’ and ‘Iron Fist’ were a little too on-the-nose, but they got the message across pretty clearly, didn’t they?

Corporal Allers shrugged.

“Sounds like a little kid thought it up but it’s fine… I guess.”

“I am a little kid!”

“Little, sure, but you haven’t acted like a kid in the whole time I’ve known you, Wunderkind,” Allers chuckled. Then he quickly shifted into serious mode and asked, “How much you want for this?”

Here was my dilemma. I didn’t have a clue how to price my FHP. Hel, I didn’t even know the prices of the most basic necessities like soap and toothpaste as all of these things were freely provided by the institute.

Seeing the confusion on my face, Corporal Allers offered a comparison I could understand. “This FHP’s even better than medi-tonic… I’ve never seen meds that work that fast before.”

Out of all the miracle drugs I’d heard about, medi-tonic, which was a regenerate — medicine that helped to drastically boost someone’s natural healing ability — was the most potent stuff on the shelves. This made it the competition my FHP was about to blow out of the water. Which meant I could probably ask for double the price. Probably.

“Um, what’s the black-market price for medi-tonic?”

His face turned contemplative for a moment before he answered with, “Around seventy Eurans per hundred ml vial. Double that for the two-hundred ml vials.”

I glanced down at the FHP vial in his hand. It was a hundred ml vial too.

“Can we sell at a hundred forty Eurans?”

Corporal Allers brow knotted while he thought about it.

“You could probably sell for triple the price of medi-tonic…”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming…”

“But your product’s an unknown… We need to build demand for it before we can up the price.”

I made a quick calculation in my head — considering the limited number of vials I had to sell along with the possibility of making more of the stuff without alerting Boss to my new scheme plus acquiring ingredients for other potions and tonics — and I decided that two hundred Eurans a vial seemed a fair price.

“Use one vial as a test product and then sell the other eight. You can get your five percent from the proceeds.”

Corporal Allers cleared his throat.

“You mean fifty percent, don’t you?”

“I meant ten percent.”

“Forty.”

“Fifteen.”

“Thirty-five.”

We glared at each other, neither one of us blinking for as long as we could.

“Sixteen.”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “You’re supposed to say twenty…”

“Fine. Twenty it is.”

Well, that was easy… Thank you, Monopoly, for training me in the ways of haggling.

I grinned, prompting the confused expression that flashed on his face.

“Wait, I didn’t say—”

“You did though.”

“Motherfu—”

Then he let out a long sigh.

“Fine… Twenty. For this first sale.”

We shook hands, and then I passed him my bag.

“Nice doing business with you.”

“Uhuh…” As Corporal Allers slung it over his shoulder, he glanced left and then right, making sure no one was close by before reminding me of my other request. “I can get it for you, but an elemental core’s going to be expensive.”

“How expensive?”

Corporal Allers raised a finger.

A thousand Eurans… yeah, that was pretty steep, but I really wanted it. Assuming G’s theory on magical meridians wasn’t just a fairy tale, then an elemental core was the first step in ensuring I was strong enough to enact our eventual escape from the institute.

“Take the expenses out of the earnings… Oh, and I’ll need these too.”

I passed him a note detailing a list of ingredients for the Fire Draft recipe.

“A hundred grams of saltpeter… hundred and fifty grams of zinc…” he eyed my list. “You can get most of this stuff at the labs, you know.”

“Yeah, but I’d rather have my own ingredients.”

It wasn’t likely, but an experienced alchemist could probably guess at what I’d been making just from the ingredients I used. I was pretty sure Boss took note of the stuff I’d used last time for my FHP. It would be better to have my own ingredients and not give him any clues to what I would be concocting next.

After Corporal Allers left to take care of my requests, I hung outside Number Five’s room and waited for the results of Dr. Michel’s exam. It took another half-hour, but I was eventually allowed to visit my friend again, although Dr. Michel reminded me not to overstay my welcome.

“At least try to go to morning class,” she reminded me.

Although she knew better than most that I usually skipped morning period, opting instead to train with Major Wolf whenever I could. I seriously wasn’t a big fan of Arithmetic, a subject eight-year-olds shouldn’t even have to learn yet but most of my crib mates were already excellent at — freaking overachieving kids!

“How’s Twelve?” Number Five asked in a raspy voice.

“Faring better than you,” I answered.

“Really?”

“Yup.”

“Thank the All-Father…”

I was suddenly reminded that I wasn’t the only big brother among our crib mates.

“So, what’s new?” he asked.

He offered me a weak smile that made me feel bad. FHP might have saved him from death but it hadn’t healed him completely.

“Heard you kicked butt yesterday,” I said as I sat on the chair by his bed.

We traded fist bumps, a high five, and then ended with the usual palms slide.

“I heard you kicked butt,” he threw my words back at me. “How’d you beat a fiend and not end up like me?”

“Well, if you really want to know,” I began.

I went on to regale him of my heroic version of recent events, embellishing my actions against the fiend as much as possible without making it sound too much like a tall tale. No, I wasn’t bragging. I was trying to make Number Five laugh. Although all I got was a weak chuckle and a pat on the arm for my trouble.

“You really are strong, One… The rest of us just can’t compare,” he whispered.

Number Five had said it in jest, but there was something in the way his voice cracked that made me think he meant it too. And I was suddenly ashamed for showing off and making him feel like he couldn’t measure up to me because I’d won my fight while he… well, he almost died.

“My fiend was probably weaker than the one you fought,” I insisted.

There was a moment of awkward silence while I watched Number Five stare into space with an expression I couldn’t quite read. He snapped out of it eventually and then told me what had happened on their excursion to the outside world.

“We were close to Sprühregen when it attacked us,” he began. “Took down the horses before anyone even knew what was happening… then the shooting started… and… the dying.”

I could only imagine how hard it must have been to watch so many of your comrades dying in front of you. Hel, I’d had a tough enough time just feeling guilty over Jenkins’ death.

Number Five told me how Number Eleven had been the one to expose the fiend. It had been moving so fast that it was a blur until she’d used sorcery to stop it in its tracks.

“She transfigured the ground into a carpet of spikes that kept the fiend from running around all over the place… That got its attention… and then it came after Eleven.”

He’d closed his eyes while he described her gruesome end. How the wolf-fiend had corralled Number Eleven away from the rest of the squad before tearing her arms off with its jaws.

“It wouldn’t let us near her, and she bled out before we could…”

Hearing it was pretty much deja vu for me as Private Jenkins had died similarly.

“Some of the guys turned and ran, but Twelve and I, we stayed… We couldn’t leave Eleven there…”

“They ran? Seriously?”

“The ones that did get killed. Idiots turned their back on a monster so it just ran past us and killed them first,” Number Five explained, chuckling, and then coughing afterward.

I let his coughing fit finish before encouraging him to continue.

“When it came at us…” You could see the fear on Number Five’s face. He turned pale and wide-eyed while he recalled the next moments. “Twelve and I tried to fight it … and we were doing okay for a while. I distracted it with my explosive farts—”

I fought the urge to call him out on his dumb naming sense. I mean, ‘Exploding Fart’ was what he named a conjuration spell that compressed a pocket of air into a golf ball-sized shape whose bottled-up pressure would eventually cause it to explode violently.

I’d been on the receiving end of it before, and although not particularly powerful, having one explode next to your ear created all sorts of problems. One ‘Exploding Fart’ was loud enough to make one’s heart skip a beat. He’d also managed to make them smell like actual farts, the kind that heralded the coming of a big dump.

“—and Twelve used her ‘Solid Wind’ to slam the fiend down into the ground when it got too close… It was going amazingly… but I tripped and—”

I fought the urge to slap my forehead at hearing that last bit.

“—gave the wolf guy the chance to pounce on me…”

Number Five paused, but not for dramatic effect which is what I would have done. No, I think it was because he had a hard time recounting what happened next.

“Twelve… she moved to protect me…”

He paused again.

“And she got in its way… so it bit her instead of me.”

So that’s how Number Twelve got hurt. Sheesh. I hope they gave her an extra-strong rabies shot.

Number Five’s face knotted into an expression of deep regret and pain — and I understood why. As we grew older, most of us had begun to notice how similar Numbers Five and Twelve looked. They were identical enough that we eventually guessed they were actual siblings. Fraternal twins even. And although none of the adults deigned to confirm this, we kids decided that this was a fact. That truth made Number Five and Number Twelve inseparable. Kind of like how Number Three and I were. And to watch your twin get gorged on by a monster, well, that would have been hard to stomach for anyone.

“It would have killed her if I didn’t use ‘Lullaby’ to stop it.”

Lullaby — that’s what Number Five called his ultimate spell. He’d used it on me before in that one sparring session two months ago where he’d actually dominated the fight.

We’d done our usual dance with him on the backfoot while I pressed my advantage. Not much anyone could do against a kid who could turn his blood-coated skin into something as hard as iron. But Number Five had learned from all the beatings, opting instead to lure me in so that he could whistle right next to my ear. I didn’t even notice the sound wave hit me until I was already kneeling on the floor while overcome with an intense headache and nausea that nearly made me pass out.

Major Wolf had later explained that my eardrum had been hit by what was basically a sonic attack; a high-powered sound wave that disrupted my equilibrium.

I had no talent for the air element so I didn’t have a clue how one might manipulate air to produce sound strong enough to make someone want to puke, but that was just how skilled Number Five was. It’s why I never thought I was a better apprentice arcanist than him.

“Wow, that must have sucked for the fiend,” I said in encouragement.

“Yeah,” he replied without much enthusiasm. “It had big ears… Lullaby knocked it out.”

“Seriously?”

He didn’t look happy though and I would quickly learn why.

Number Five had thought what I thought — the fiend had been struck down and was down for the count. But we were both wrong. Because, while Number Five took that time to give his twin first-aid, he’d failed to realize that the fiend hadn’t been as incapacitated as he’d thought. It cost him dearly. Its claws had ripped into his back, puncturing his lung. Then it beat on Number Five like an enraged berserker, which I guessed had been the cause of his concussion and ensuing brain bleed.

“My vision was all blurry and my brain hurt… but I couldn’t look away from the monster that mounted me…”

Number Five let out a grin that was so reminiscent of my mischievous friend that I almost believed he might be back to normal.

It got too close… and I got to do one last ‘Lullaby’ before it could eat my face.”

“Nice!”

I bumped his fist in appreciation of his grit.

“Then what happened?”

Number Five shrugged. “Not sure. I was half-dead by then.”

“I can smell a ‘but’ coming.”

He frowned. It was a deep kind of frown born out of a combination of confusion and doubt, the kind I usually had when I looked in the mirror and wondered how I lucked out with such a handsome face. Yeah, I was proud of my looks. Sue me.

“I didn’t think ‘Lullaby’ worked as well this time… it got sluggish though,” he explained. “It still might have bitten my face off, but… I think I heard someone call to it.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Call to it?”

“Stop it.”

“And it listened?”

Number Five shrugged.

“Maybe. It didn’t eat me, did it?”

“Then what?”

I should note that I was on the edge of my seat at this point.

“It left me…”

A few more seconds of dead air passed.

“And?”

“I don’t know. I blacked out by then.”

Talk about anticlimactic. And here I was hoping to hear how Professor Schmidt had beaten the wolf-fiend. Speaking of Professor Schmidt, I was suddenly reminded of our awkward conversation yesterday. Particularly the part where he’d admitted that Major Wolf told him about that insidious journal we discovered. That bothered me more than I cared to admit.

No way… Master said not to tell anyone… he wouldn’t break his own rules, would he?

Honestly, it didn’t add up. Major Wolf wasn’t naïve enough to let someone in on that big of a secret. Not without being sure he could trust them. And apart from Lieutenant Spiers and me, I didn’t think my master trusted anyone in the institute.

But how does Schmidt know about the journal? I sighed. I’ll ask Wolf about this later…

“One, you there?”

I blinked. “What?”

“I asked you what was new with you.”

I didn’t know how he managed to sound upbeat after recounting his story, but I could tell he was forcing it. Luckily for him, I had just the thing to make him feel better.

“Keep this between you and me, alright?”

“Bro code?”

Yeah, I’d thought him that phrase which I explained meant a pact of absolute trust and loyalty between boys.

“Yeah. Bro code.”

I made sure the door was closed before I pulled out the tome I’d been keeping inside my shirt. Then I offered Potions and Tonics for the Aberrant Mind to Number Five because I knew he’d get a kick out of the weird formulas written inside it. Not to mention thane otherworldly text that would have made him pretty curious. Only, it didn’t.

Yeah, he’d laughed at the ‘Beautifying One’s Ugly Face’ recipe as well as the ‘Dispel Pungent Odor from your Privates’ tonic, but there was not a hint of puzzlement appearing on his face even though he’d flipped through half the tome already.

“Where’d you get this thing?” he chuckled.

I frowned. “Didn’t you see the first page?”

“Yeah. I did.”

He flipped back to the first page which was the welcome message that had been written in Armes.

“Not that. I meant the first page.”

He flipped to the page before the Armes introduction, and although I could see the English text on it, Number Five just said, “It’s blank. Weird.”

My brow creased. “Blank?”

Holy shit… he can’t read it…

Then I recalled the end of G’s letter; I have written these words in magical ink that should only activate in the presence of one who shares my unfortunate fate — and I realized only I could read the secrets hidden inside this book. I had hoped to share some of my burden with Number Five — I knew I could trust him — but maybe I was wrong to think that. Maybe this burden was for me alone to carry — and that included figuring out how to save myself and my crib mates from the institute. It was a lonely thought to have.

“Are you okay, One?” Number Five asked. “You look even paler than me.”