The Quantum Games (Alchemists Academy #3) Read online

“All those deaths,” Wirt said, “so surely there has to be someone willing to stop this?”

  “Who?” Spencer asked.

  “I don’t know. Your father? The headmaster? Ms. Lake? There has to be someone.”

  Spencer shook his head. “Not as far as I can see. My father… well, he thinks that it will make a man of me. He did it, and he wants me to do it, especially when Roland is one of my opponents. After all, Roland’s father tried to murder mine.”

  After the death of the girl, Elise, the young Henry Black had tried to kill Mr. Bentley with magic. Wirt should have known better than to suggest that Spencer’s father would let him back down.

  “What about…”

  “There isn’t anyone,” Spencer said, cutting him off. “You heard the headmaster. He isn’t about to stop it, and he isn’t going to listen to someone like Ms. Lake over it. The school governors want this too badly for that.”

  The school governors. What other kind of school had governors with more tentacles than legs, and more eyeballs than both? It seemed strange that the school should owe so much to such utterly alien and inhuman creatures, but that was probably just a side effect of having access to so many different dimensions. Spencer was right though. With those creatures backing the Quantum Games, stopping them would be difficult to do.

  Which meant that he would almost certainly end up hunting and fighting his friend, using the quantum ball as a weapon. What would that be like? Would there be the same sense of total awareness that there had been with the deer? And if he couldn’t even bring himself to kill a defenseless animal, how would he be able to throw a quantum ball at Spencer, knowing what it could do? What would it be like if Spencer threw one at him? Would Spencer throw one at him? They were close friends, but he’d already as good as said that he’d do whatever he had to in order to stay with Alana.

  Wirt was willing to bet Roland didn’t have this kind of problem.

  “What do you think Roland is up to?” Wirt asked.

  “Up to? Is this the box again?”

  Wirt had explained about Roland and the voices coming from his box last term, but Spencer hadn’t had any more idea of what was going on than Wirt. Wirt shook his head.

  “I don’t mean that. I mean the way he was acting. I would have expected him to be cut up about losing Alana to you, but he was perfectly normal. Well… as normal as he ever is. He was talking to a group of girls like nothing had happened.”

  “Maybe he’s just the kind of guy who moves on easily,” Spencer said, in a tense tone of voice that made it clear he didn’t really believe that. “Or maybe he’s just confident about the Quantum Games.”

  “You think he should be confident?” Wirt asked. He had to. Spencer had grown up knowing about the Quantum Games. He would know far better than Wirt how well someone like Roland was likely to do in them.

  “Look outside,” Spencer said by way of an answer, pointing out through the window to the meadow in front of the giant tree that housed the school. Wirt looked down, following the line of the pointing finger.

  He saw a tiny figure down there, and a moment or two of concentration revealed that it was Roland. He was standing at the center of some kind of circle, with a series of devices arranged around the edge. There were at least half a dozen of them, and each one looked like a cross between a miniature cannon and the kind of thing a baseball player might use to practice batting against. Their purpose became clear when the first couple of them started to fire brightly colored balls at Roland, who dodged to one side before moving back into position.

  They fired again, and Roland dodged again, just in time for another one to shoot. That ball stopped a little wall from him, blocked by an invisible wall of air. That was just the start though. More and more of the machines started to fire, until Roland was dodging balls from all sides, seeming to move with almost impossible speed to avoid some of them. He wove and ducked, leapt and threw himself flat, blocking any balls he absolutely couldn’t avoid, with his magic.

  Even from up where Wirt was standing, it looked spectacular. Roland dodged balls with the grace of a dancer, like he’d been practicing to do it all his life. Maybe he had. Wirt swallowed. He’d thought he was getting somewhere with his lessons with Ms. Burns. He’d thought that he might actually have a chance of succeeding in the Quantum Games, yet compared with the kind of thing that Roland was doing down in front of the school, it was like he barely even knew how to hold the ball.

  Chapter 7

  After a while, Wirt stopped looking out of the window. Without a word to Spencer, he walked over to the nearest of the transport tubes that ran throughout the tree, stepping in with a clear destination in mind. He landed in an old cave, with shadows dancing around the walls forming strange shapes by the light of an orange glow.

  “Llew, are you there?” Wirt called out.

  A familiar strong Welsh accent answered him. “Wirt? Is that you, boyo?”

  The huge red dragon came forward in the human form his magic let him adopt, that of a tall man with hair so red it matched the shirt he wore.

  “I haven’t seen you down in my cave recently,” the transformed dragon said, gesturing to a rock shaped remarkably like a sofa. Wirt guessed that with dragon strength and fire, shaping it wasn’t hard.

  Wirt sat down. “I could do with some advice, Llew.”

  “From me?” Llew looked faintly surprised by that. “Why me?”

  “Because you’re one of the only people here I’m fairly sure doesn’t want anything from me.”

  Llew shrugged. “Not unless you happen to have any comfortable looking piles of gold or particularly edible fair maidens about your person. But what about Vivaine, or that Ms. Burns? They’ve both tried to help you, haven’t they?”

  Wirt shook his head. “I’m grateful to them. Obviously I am. And part of me wants to believe that they’re doing it just out of kindness, but…”

  “But they obviously have things of their own that they aren’t telling you,” Llew finished for him. “Whereas I am friendly, and helpful, and not at all… oh, wait.”

  For a moment, something about the angle of the light striking the man in front of him seemed to change, and Wirt saw red scales instead of a shirt. Saw eyes staring down at him that were larger than his head. Saw teeth that were as long as any sword. Then Llew was standing there again, just as he had been.

  “You can see the problem there,” the dragon said.

  Wirt swallowed, and then nodded.

  Llew grinned, patting Wirt on the shoulder. “Boyo, everyone has things they don’t tell people. They have things they want, or ulterior motives for some of their decisions. It doesn’t make them bad people.”

  “I know that,” Wirt insisted. “It’s just that I… I guess I could use some advice from someone who doesn’t seem to have anything at stake in all this.”

  Llew tilted his head to one side, and then sat down beside Wirt. “What kind of advice?”

  Wirt took a breath. “It’s about the Quantum Games. I feel like I don’t have any choice about entering them, because staying on here is my best way home. It’s also the only way I’m going to fit into this world if I don’t go. Yet if I do keep going, that means taking on Spencer. And it means trying to beat Roland, who has obviously been training for this his whole life.”

  Llew spread his hands. “If you want extra training to beat Roland, hasn’t Ms. Burns been teaching you?”

  Wirt nodded. “But she said that she wouldn’t have the time now.”

  “You should still try asking her. As for the other part…” Llew sighed, and a jet of flame shot over to the other side of the cave. “Sorry, but that part is your decision, Wirt. You have to do what you feel is right, not what I tell you to do. For now though, you should probably get over to Ms. Burns. That way, whatever you decide, you’ll be better prepared than you are.”

  “That wouldn’t be hard,” Wirt said. “Right now, I feel like I’m not even close to being ready.”

  Knowing that wa
s all the help he was likely to get out of the dragon, Wirt stepped back into the transportation tube leading from his cave and willed his way up to the floor where several of the teachers had offices. Ms. Burns might share a home with Ms. Lake at the moment, but she kept a separate classroom for those students who couldn’t use magic to breathe underwater. Wirt arrived there in just a few seconds, then raised his hand to knock on the door.

  Ms. Burns opened it before he could do it. She smiled. “Hello, Wirt. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “You have?”

  The teacher nodded, gesturing for him to come inside. “Of course I have. I saw Roland practicing outside too. He was very impressive.”

  “Impressive?” Wirt stepped into the classroom. It was neat, with all the books from before put away neatly. “He’s far better than I am. That thing with the quantum ball earlier… it was a lucky shot. I certainly can’t do half the things Roland does.”

  “Can’t you?”

  “No, I can’t,” Wirt insisted.

  “Well then,” Ms. Burns said with a smile, “you might as well give up then. I mean, we wouldn’t want to get you disintegrated.”

  Wirt shook his head. “I… I don’t think I can do that either.”

  “Well, you’d better be wrong about one of those two things if you want to stay alive, Wirt,” Ms. Burns pointed out. She said it calmly, but it was clear that she was serious, and she had a point. Wirt needed either to be better than Roland was, or to pull out of the Games and leave the school. The only other option was losing, and that… well, Wirt didn’t want to think about that.

  “I know before, you said that you were going to be very busy,” Wirt said, “but…”

  “But you were hoping that I’d help you do more to prepare, because you think you aren’t ready,” Ms. Burns finished for him.

  “I know I’m not ready.”

  Ms. Burns sighed. “Then I guess we had better change your mind. Let’s start with something simple. I want you to transport us to the practice field outside the school.”

  Wirt looked at her. His transportation magic was pretty good, but he normally just transported himself, not anyone else. In fact, thanks to a combination of the strange internal geography of the school and Ender Paine’s dislike of students transporting themselves where they pleased, he normally used the transportation tubes.

  “What are you waiting for, Wirt?” Ms. Burns asked.

  “But… you can transport yourself, can’t you?”

  Ms. Burns looked stern for a moment. “I want you to do it, Wirt. Now, either do as I ask or stop wasting both of our time.”

  Wirt summoned up his power for transportation, and in an instant, the scene around the two of them shifted. There was open grass around them now, with a large lake in the background and a smaller pond nearby. Wirt had created that pond, accidentally, one time when Ms. Burns had pushed him off the upper branches of the tree just to force him to do it.

  The tree. How had it come to be normal to think about living in a giant tree like it was nothing? The tree was larger than most buildings, hundreds of feet around the base and dozens of floors tall. In the afternoon sun, its shadow reached out over the surrounding meadow, like the world’s biggest sun dial, and clusters of the younger students still glanced up at it in awe, because they hadn’t been there long enough yet to see it as normal.

  Ms. Burns looked around, the sunlight glinting off the deep red of her hair as she brushed a couple of invisible specks of dust off her dress.

  “Why did you make me do that?” Wirt asked.

  “To remind you that you could, of course.” Ms. Burns smiled the infuriating smile Wirt had seen so much of over the vacation thanks to her love of lessons that were anything but normal, even by the standards of the school.

  “So you were just trying to show me that I can transport two people?” Wirt shrugged. “I know that.”

  “You say it like it’s nothing,” Ms. Burns retorted. “Ms. Lake can do it over a short distance. Perhaps a couple of others can too, but most of the teachers here can’t. I certainly can’t. And none of them, none of them can transport over the kind of distances or with the accuracy you can.”

  “So how does that help me in the Quantum Games?” Wirt asked.

  “You know, it’s hard sometimes remembering that you’re just a boy here rather than… well, I won’t go into that. Then you’ll say something like that and remind me. First, it gives you a massive tool to use, because the format of the Quantum Games lets you use almost anything you can. Second, it wasn’t about reminding you that you can transport, Wirt. It was about showing you that you have a lot more power than you think. The same way you had hunting the deer this morning.”

  Wirt wanted to point out that if that were the case, he would have finished a lot higher in all his classes, but he didn’t. Not only would Ms. Burns probably not listen, but also, she actually had a point. Kind of. There had been so many moments now when he’d used power that he hadn’t thought he’d had. He’d been able to transport himself to places he simply shouldn’t have been able to, including to the school in the first place. He’d discovered an instinctive knack for elemental magic, transmutation magic, and more. He’d been able to feel the whole forest when they had stalked the deer.

  “I know you’re worried that you don’t know enough,” Ms. Burns said. “You’re worried that your powers might not come into play, or that Roland has all the advantages. Believe me though, Wirt, you’re wrong. You’re far more than you could ever know, and even if you weren’t everything I know you to be, then you would still be enough that you shouldn’t think like that. Thinking other people are more powerful, that we aren’t enough as we are… it gives away the one power we all possess.”

  “And what’s that?” Wirt asked.

  “The power to make our own choices. To choose what we will and won’t do, and who we will be. Other people like to pretend that they can make those choices for us, or that things are inevitable, but they aren’t. I wouldn’t be here unless I believed that.”

  That sounded like another cryptic reference to the future, and Wirt knew better than to ask about it. Instead, he looked around. A group of younger students seemed to be making their way over to the two of them.

  “I appreciate the reminder, Ms. Burns,” Wirt said, “but isn’t there something I can do to get more practice in too? I mean, Roland had devices firing balls at him from all angles.”

  Ms. Burns nodded. “I’ve thought about that, and you’ll have something far better.”

  “Like what?”

  She gestured towards the approaching students. “Wirt, I’d like you to meet my beginners’ elemental studies class, which will be working with the element of air today.”

  Air? What did that have to do with him? Was that just Ms. Burns’ way of telling him that she didn’t have the time for any more one to one instruction?

  “I don’t understand,” Wirt admitted.

  Ms. Burns smiled the kind of smile Wirt had learned to be very worried about going into a lesson.

  “Specifically,” she said, “they will be learning exactly how much air it takes to propel a small ball towards a waiting target. The target being you, in this case.”

  Chapter 8

  The next morning brought bruises, because it turned out that Ms. Burns’ students could throw balls with remarkable accuracy. Yet there weren’t quite as many as he’d thought there would be. He’d been hit by the first few balls, but then he had started to dodge, and to his surprise he had been able to start avoiding the throws of Ms. Burns’ students quite easily. He hadn’t dove or spun with Roland’s agility, but gradually he’d been able to extend that same awareness he’d had in the forest, letting him see the worst of the “attacks” coming. And when he couldn’t dodge physically, Wirt had transported himself out of the way. He’d still been hit from time to time, because there were a lot of students, but it was only very occasionally.

  “Are you getting out of bed at any time
today?” Robert asked, adjusting the clothes he’d picked out. Today it was a tunic and hose in bright red and gold that seemed opulently noble until Wirt realized that it was probably about as close as Robert could get to a jester’s motley these days.

  “Why?” Wirt asked. “It’s not like I have classes.”

  “Even if that were true, I would expect you to be up and about, training for the Games. I wouldn’t want to lose my advisor so soon. As it is, you are my advisor, and so you do have classes.”

  “What classes?” Wirt asked.

  “My classes, of course. Or did you think that Alana followed Priscilla for no reason?”

  Wirt got up and dressed for class, picking out a similar set of clothes to the day before. In theory, his magical box wardrobe could have produced almost anything for him to wear, but in practice, that just meant he tended to settle on the same few things.

  “All right, but what classes do you even take? I mean, I’ve heard you talking about things like heraldry, and I know you had a kind of catch up class with the headmaster last term… please tell me that we aren’t going to that.”

  “Oh no,” Robert said with a smile. “The headmaster taught me a lot about magic, but he apparently isn’t interested in a student who, in the middle of attempts to contact evil creatures living outside the realms of human understanding, is inclined to tell them jokes.”

  Wirt looked at Robert in something approaching horror, which shifted to admiration as he started to understand. “You did it deliberately so that he wouldn’t want to teach you anymore.”

  Robert shrugged. “Comedy has many uses. Getting into some classes where my teacher isn’t trying to show me runes that will melt the unprepared brain is just one of them.”

  Again, Wirt couldn’t help feeling that there was more to Robert than met the eye. When he’d first arrived there, Wirt had been convinced that Robert was nice enough but essentially useless. A bit like his sister, only without Alana’s guiding hand. Now, it seemed that Robert was genuinely clever, and able to manipulate the people around him a lot more effectively than Wirt had given him credit for.