“No, for the tenth time, Carlu, I don’t have any idea what the poem means. I think the killer was trying to get under my skin or perhaps send pursuit off on a red herring. I mean, look at the time you’ve been wasting today. How thoroughly have you managed to go through the killer’s belongings that we found? Have you at all, or was your inspection interrupted by Alyss’s murder? I hope you’ve got guards on all of that stuff . . .” Olivia would have kept ranting, but the inspector stopped her by grabbing her elbow.

“Wait! Ms. Bennet, we should walk out to the pavilion through the rear gardens. It’s a slightly longer route, but we’ll be less likely to run into any trouble.” Olivia stopped at the door she’d been about to go through and jerked her arm away from the slender, dapper man, not pleased with how his fingers dug into her flesh.

“If you think so,” she said, pausing to let him lead the way. She knew how to get to the rear gardens, but she was irritated enough by the way he grabbed her arm that she didn’t want him lingering behind her while they walked.

“Thank you,” Carlu said, then started up the hallway to their left. “I’m not a slouch when it comes to personal combat, but I’d rather not have to face the killer on his terms. Let’s get you safely to the Travel Pavillion, and then I can focus on tracking him down, hmm?”

“Yes, but I’m telling you, focus less on Alyss and that poem and more on the objects we found in the killer’s lair!” Olivia followed the inspector past another large hallway that led toward the cafeteria and then up a side passage that she knew would open into the gardens, or at least the cobbled path that led to the gardens.

“I’ll take your advice to heart, Ms. Bennet, but I’m not one to let such a set of clues go so easily. Never fear, though, I have the ability to multi-task, and I’ll be sure to continue my investigation into the killer’s belongings. You’re quite right on one account—I’m sure those effects will eventually lead me to the killer. I’m treating the dear professor’s murder as a way to speed the process, hopefully.”

Olivia didn’t answer him. She was tired of thinking and talking, especially about the killer. She just wanted to hug Adaida and slip through the portal back to Morgan’s tower, where she could relax and forget about all of this. Thinking of her friends waiting to say goodbye to her, Olivia had a momentary panic about leaving them all here to the killer’s mercy, and she determined that they’d all be coming back to First Landing with her, even if she had to drag them through the portal.

They’d made it up the cobbled walkway to the flower garden Carlu wanted to cut through, and when he opened the gate, he paused for a moment, flipping the lenses around on his goggles and staring at the air around him. He held up a hand when Olivia started to ask what he was doing, then he stepped forward and stared at the stones in front of the gate for several long heartbeats. Finally, he turned to her, his mouth slightly open and his eyes huge through his lenses, and said, “Olivia! Would you mind casting that tracking spell again? The one we devised to hunt the killer’s Energy?”

“You see something?” she asked, already building the pattern in her pathways.

“Yes, I do! Please hurry!” He wrung his hands agitatedly, staring at her.

Olivia didn’t answer but finished the spell and watched as her magenta tracking winds swirled around the gateway and then rushed off into the garden. “They have the scent!” Olivia said, pushing past Carlu.

“Wait! Shouldn’t we get help?” Carlu asked, grabbing onto her robe.

“Let go, Carlu! You can get help if you want, but I’m not going to lose this trail!” Olivia jerked free of his grasp for the second time that day and hurried down the path. She heard him coming after her and felt a little guilty about putting him in danger, but wasn’t this his job?

“No, I won’t leave you alone. I’m with you, Ms. Bennet,” Carlu said, confirming her thoughts.

“Thank you, Carlu,” Olivia said while she hurried after her breezes, following their twisting path through the garden, moving deeper and further to the left than their path would have taken them if they’d gone straight to the Travel Pavillion. One of her breezes would always wait at a turn, ensuring she caught up before rushing after the others. Olivia glanced over her shoulder several times, ensuring Carlu was still with her and that no one was sneaking up on them; she had visions of a black-robed killer lurking down one of the side paths.

She could see a bit into the rows nearest her, as most of the flowering shrubs had gone dormant for the winter. Still, it seemed that those that had designed the garden had managed to plant a large variety of plants that appeared to produce leaves and flowers even this late in the year. Olivia caught herself thinking about what sorts of plants would be able to grow with such chilly nighttime temperatures and shook her head. “Need to stay focused,” she growled, turning around another corner where one of her magenta breezes had been circling.

She stumbled to a halt when she found the ground had been dug up in a little alcove of planters, and a trapdoor had been left open, exposing an ancient-looking wooden ladder that descended into darkness. As Olivia stumbled to a halt, her breeze dove into the dark opening, and she saw that red, sticky splashes and puddles surrounded the opening. “Oh, God! Did he kill someone here?”

“Hmm, I’m not sure, Ms. Bennet. There’s not as much blood as at the other murder sites. Perhaps he’s injured someone and taken them down? Or perhaps he, himself, is injured.”

“C’mon, Carlu!” Olivia said and summoned an orb of plasma, letting it sink into the opening. The crackling, hissing orb of brilliant blue-white Energy revealed nothing more than a few feet of the narrow, dirt-lined shaft, so Olivia began climbing the ladder down, looking past her feet as her orb descended ahead of her. She’d made it down about six feet when her orb winked out, plunging her into darkness. Olivia had been in the midst of taking a step down, and when the ladder suddenly shifted under her hands in the darkness, changing from dry, ancient wood to something slick and flowing, she cried out as her foot met nothing but air, and she fell.

She plunged downward, and her first instinct was to cast Elemental Form, taking on her air aspect. As she pushed the Energy into her pathways and cast the spell, nothing happened other than the Energy being sucked out of her, and not just the Energy for the spell—all of her air-attuned Energy was drawn from her Core, and Olivia panicked, instantly aware of what had happened. She was falling into a space with wards like those in the detention cells.

Just as she connected the dots, her back slammed into something solid, like stone, and if it weren’t for her robes, she was sure it would have hurt. Nevertheless, her magical robes did their job and absorbed most of the impact, and she rolled to her knees and stood up, staring into the darkness, her breaths coming quick and shallow. The only light was the square of sky up the shaft she’d come down, and as she glanced up at it, her hope dissolved as it winked out. Someone had closed the trapdoor.

Olivia reached into her storage ring and pulled out an object she hadn’t needed in a very long time—a glow-lamp she’d carried with her since she’d been a tier-zero nobody who’d gone to face a Yovashi with her friends. The soft, pale light lit up the space she stood in, and Olivia saw that she was in an oval, stone chamber. The shaft leading up from the ceiling was nearly ten feet over her head. At her feet, atop the stone, was a blue, metal latticework of runes arranged in a circle, and she knew it was the source of the Energy sapping wards.

The metal circle was about eight feet in diameter, and it met the walls neatly around the chamber, though one end of the space was open, a dark stone corridor leading away. Olivia strode toward the tunnel, hope blooming in her chest, but when she came to the edge of the rune-covered metal frame, her foot simply couldn’t step over it. It was like being in a perfectly clear glass cage, one that ate the Energy from any spell she tried to cast.

“Dammit,” Olivia said, kneeling to get a better look at the lattice. She hoped that maybe she could damage or deface it somehow. When she touched the cold metal with her fingers, she froze, ice sliding down her spine—it felt exactly like the Energy signature she’d been chasing ever since the killer had attacked her and Adaida in the Alchemy gardens. It was cold and slippery and left a dirty feeling on her fingers. Olivia took a sharp knife from her storage ring and began to scrape and carve at one of the metal runes.

She grunted in frustration as her efforts were unrewarded—the metal was tougher than steel, as far as she could tell. In further frustration, she tried, again, to summon a plasma orb, only to have her air and fire-attuned Energies drained from her Core. There hadn’t been much air, but with it gone and her fire Energy gone with it, she felt cold and lethargic, and frustration threatened to fill her eyes with tears or bring a screech of rage from her throat. She took several deep breaths to calm down and think, and that’s when Carlu spoke up.

“You won’t find a way out of there, Ms. Bennet,” he said, and Olivia saw that he’d approached her from the stone corridor and was leaning against the wall, watching her over the tops of his strange goggle-like glasses.

“Carlu! Help me out! Get help if you must!” Olivia said, standing up, but when she saw his expression, she finally connected the dots. “Oh. You’re not going to help me.”

“Bravo!” Carlu said, slowly clapping his hands. Olivia had time to wonder if he’d really said, “bravo,” or if the System had translated some other Shadeni colloquialism for her, then he continued, “Finally, the genius, the prodigy, the powerhouse that needs no help, has managed to compute some simple arithmetic!”

“But, Carlu, why? Are you angry that I was interfering in your investigation?” Olivia, despite Carlu’s sarcasm, still hadn’t put everything together. She couldn’t fathom that Carlu and the killer were one and the same—hadn’t the killing started before he arrived at campus? She cleared her throat and said, “Carlu, the killer made this trap! I can feel the Energy. I know you’re angry with me, but you need to get me out of here. He could be nearby!”

“I thought you were smarter than that, Olivia. You’re right; the killer made that ward circle, tailored quite specifically to block your abilities, I might add. I, however, made this trap. Imagine the arrogance! To think you could solve these murders while a Vesneya-trained investigator was on the premise. What a fool you are. What fools the staff here are!” Carlu broke into a laugh then, clearly savoring the moment. “I could have scried out or tracked the killer from the first day I was here. In fact, I found it more challenging to drag out the investigation without arousing suspicion!”

“But, why, Carlu? Are you friends with the killer? You’re protecting someone?”

“You dolt. Why does anyone do anything in this world? Power, my dear. Power. I’ll be greatly rewarded by the one who hired me. Now, be a good girl, and don’t hurt yourself in there. My employer will be here before long, and I’m sure he’d prefer to have you whole and hale for whatever purpose he had in mind.” Carlu doffed his bowler-style hat, sketched a mocking bow, then turned and walked up the hallway, ignoring Olivia’s cries for him to stop and listen to reason.