Adah looked at Iris and frowned. She wasn’t trying to send a message; it was simply a force of habit.
“Don’t give me that look,” Iris said. “I only want to watch. It would be good for me to learn from this, too, wouldn’t it?”
She made a good point, Adah had to admit.
A couple of days after her sparring practice with Seliah, Adah had asked Ekki to meet her at the same empty field. However, the two of them would be experimenting, not sparring. Adah had put off her suspicions for too long. The time had come to find out just how similar Ekki’s portals were to those that the Cruelties made use of.
Ekki showed up to the snowy field as promised, and Iris had arrived along with him. What Adah took issue with wasn’t Iris, but rather the cat floating in the air beside her.
“Does he really need to be out all the time?” Adah asked. “No one will see us here—that’s kind of the point.”
“Is my presence not agreeable?” Iosk spoke in place of Iris. “Human magic is as much a mystery to our kind as it is to yours. I, too, merely wish to observe.”
Adah debated whether it was worth reminding Iosk that he could observe their experiment just fine from the mascot’s plane of existence. Even she knew that much. Therefore, revealing his physical form could only serve one purpose. Izzy must have reached the same conclusion, and chose to show himself as well. It seemed he wouldn’t allow Iosk to impose upon this gathering of humans by himself.
The cat greeted the pig with a nod and said, “Izrashell.”
“Yes,” Izzy responded, colder than even Adah’s voice when she channeled her utmost Heartbreak.
His tone left little room for small talk between the mascots, so they watched each other in silence instead.
“You two get along even better than we do,” Iris said.
“I’d say you two have been getting along reasonably well lately,” Ekki said. He floated into their conversation from behind Adah with a smile on his face.
“Yes, well, sometimes you have to humor your coworkers with small talk,” Iris mused. “To make the job go smoothly, you listen to their stories about their weird pet pig and nod politely. I was raised with proper manners.”
Adah stretched her arms behind her back and groaned.
“That’s it—I’ve reached my limit on you for today,” she said. “I’m going to borrow your dog for a while, okay?”
“Be my guest,” Iris said.
Ekki, perhaps calculating that it wasn’t worth arguing when outnumbered by two girls with such charming personalities, merely rolled his eyes. Adah grabbed his hand and dragged him away from Iris. She then left him floating above the snowy field and positioned herself a distance far enough away to suit a particularly rigorous game of catch.
“So, what should I do?” Ekki asked her once they were in position. “Just summon them like normal?”
Adah nodded and said, “Yeah, that’s all. I want to see what it’s like to go through one of them, for starters.”
Ekki held out his arm—the one made of fog—and cast his spell. A gray oval of wispy air spread out near Adah, its shape expanding like a puddle of paint spilling over a floor until it reached a size slightly larger than Adah’s body. He conjured a second portal closer to himself, which grew in the same way.
“You use that arm for spells?” she asked him.
Ekki shrugged and said, “I can’t hold a weapon or anything with it yet, so I’ve got to put it to use somehow. It’s on-theme, don’t you think?”
Adah grinned at that. Even during his recovery, Ekki had seemed to take his injury in stride, but now he treated it almost like an asset. It wasn’t accurate to say the boy had changed, but rather he was like a refined version of himself. Adah made a mental note to ask him about how he was doing later—she ought to know more about the personalities of her allies in addition to their spells.
“What do I do now?” she asked in the meantime. “Just fly through?”
“Pretty much,” Ekki said. “I’m going to connect the two portals—kind of like an invisible tunnel between them. I don’t know how to explain it, but you’ll understand once you go through. You’ll feel like there’s a lag. When you enter the first one, visually it’ll look to you like you’ve already exited the other, but you need to go a bit farther. I guess I’d say you need to travel the full width of your body before you’re through. Maybe a little more.”
“What happens if I don’t go all the way through? And if you close the portals early?”
Ekki rocked his head side to side in contemplation, which at least told her the results wouldn’t be disastrous.
“You’ll get pushed back out the way you came,” he explained. “That’s why it’s not exactly true to call it a tunnel. It’s more binary than that. Either you got through or you didn’t, if that makes sense?”
“Nope, but I guess I’ll find out,” Adah said.
She stared into the portal nearest her. From the outside—if you could call it that—the oval showed her nothing more than a swirling clump of fog. She couldn’t see through to the exit portal at all. Since she figured there was no point in analyzing it before she experienced it, Adah flew toward the portal at a slow but steady pace.
Adah stretched a hand in front of her so that something other than her head would make contact with the portal first. According to Ekki, other magic users could travel through his portals without issue, but she couldn’t help feeling nervous. Teleportation was even more unnatural than flight. This method of dipping her toes in the water proved useless, though. As her hand passed through the portal, she felt no sensations other than the same cold winter air on her skin. Likewise, she didn’t see her hand pop out of the portal near Ekki.
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Might as well jump right in, then.
She understood what Ekki meant about the lag once her face touched the fog. The gray of his magic instantly gave way to a clear view of the world from the perspective of the second portal. Yet, a glance downward revealed that no part of Adah’s body—not even her nose—had made its way through the portals. She grit her teeth to override this strange hallucination of being body-less and flew the rest of the way through the portal.
All at once, Adah found herself next to Ekki. She checked over her shoulder and, sure enough, the gray portal floated mere inches behind her. A quick inventory check of body parts assuaged the rest of her worries.
“Maybe I should have told you to fly fast,” Ekki said with a grin. “You look sick.”
Adah felt a little sick, too, but she’d feel worse if she talked about it. She had questions for Ekki anyway.
“How does it work with more than two?” Adah asked. “I’ve seen you cast a few at once.”
“Same concept, harder execution,” Ekki said.
“With enough magic power, could you create as many as that Cruelty did?”
Ekki bit his lip and said, “It’s not really an issue of magic power. Brainpower is the problem. Again, here’s where the tunnel metaphor breaks down. When there’s a lot of portals in play, it’s not like some connect-the-dots drawing. Each one is a pip somewhere in my mind, so finding the right two to connect is hard. They’re not laid out on a map up there. It’s all…”
Without the right words, all he could do was hold his hand up near his hand and shake it about, but Adah understood him just fine. His spell asked his brain to do something unnatural for a human. Her [Parietal Perception] was similar. Those spells with a mental element forced the brain to operate more like it would during a dream, and explaining a dream to someone else was hard.
“It’s like planning what to make for dinner while trying to remember what you had for breakfast at the same time,” Iris chimed in. “That’s how you explained it to me, once.”
Adah had forgotten Iris was connected to the same magic channel that she and Ekki were talking over, so the girl’s sudden addition startled her. Iris noticed that, and made sure her resulting giggle came through the channel as well.
“That’s a good way of putting it,” Ekki said, essentially agreeing with his past self. “When other people go through, it’s even tougher.”
“Why’s that?” Adah asked.
“If I go through, or a random object, then I hardly notice,” Ekki said. “But with another person, my mind tracks them subconsciously. Like you could with a plane flying overhead. You could look away for a few seconds, then look back up and know roughly where to expect the plane to have moved to. Tracking other magic users passing through is involuntary, so it becomes another distraction to manage.”
“You’ve spat me back out a few times now,” Iris complained from afar.
If Ekki got distracted enough, maybe he’d lose track of the two portals he was connecting. Then, whoever was traveling between them would be bumped out the way they’d come, like he had mentioned. Adah smiled imagining it happening to Iris.
Now that Adah had a basic understanding of how Ekki’s spell worked, it was time to move onto the real experiment. Merely traveling through the portals wouldn’t reveal if they functioned similarly to the portals that the Cruelties used. The best theory Adah had for testing that involved her scythe.
This was the part of her experiment that Adah had really hoped to be alone for, but Iris and Iosk had no intention of leaving. At least Iris was an ally to Adah, as strange as it felt to acknowledge. But that Iosk—he was a Keteriel, and not one who had moved past their bigoted aspirations. Izzy had confirmed that Iris was an experiment of the cat’s, and Adah wasn’t keen on becoming another one of his test subjects.
For now, she had no choice but to show Iosk her scythe once more. Today’s experiment was less about her weapon than it was about these portals, anyway.
She called upon Beleth’s Bloodletter and instructed Ekki to conjure two more of his portals. When she had poked her scythe into the portal that the bat Cruelty had created, nothing had been traveling through it, so Adah figured it made sense to replicate those conditions here. In the first place, she wasn’t sure what she was hoping to discover. Better to start simple.
“Shout out if anything feels weird,” she told Ekki. “I’ll stop right away.”
“No worries,” he said. “I can always shut the portals myself.”
Ekki had created a set of two portals again, in the same positions as before. He and Adah floated about thirty feet apart—far enough that any teleportation would be meaningful, but close enough to easily keep an eye on each other. If anything went awry, Adah wanted to be close by to help.
Adah stared into the portal near her. This one looked the same as the last, and not much different from those the Cruelties created. The real difference was that Ekki’s appeared clearly as an addition to the world. His were little clouds of fog—unnatural in their strict adherence to a shape, but otherwise familiar. The portals the Cruelties created were more like holes in the world. Rather than adding to the physical world, they seemed to carve a chunk out of it.
She held her scythe out to the foggy portal in front of her. Since she couldn’t learn much more through simple observation, she decided not to waste any more time. She plunged the scythe’s blade into the portal.
The heartbeat echoed in her hands as soon as the tip of the blade pierced the fog, just as it had with the Cruelty portal. Yet, this heartbeat was singular. It was intense—as strong in its vibration as when she claimed the essence of a higher ranked Cruelty—but it stuck to simple rhythm. Thump-thump. She felt no erratic beating and nothing like a heart attack. This was a sensation she was used to, and so she didn’t pull her scythe away. She wanted to feel this beating a while longer, and to see if she could sense anything else through the portal.
But that decision wasn’t hers alone.
To the side, she noticed Ekki’s body shake with a full shiver, like something had spooked him. The boy spun around and searched behind himself and, as he did, both of his portals faded away. Adah flew over to him, though Iris had already beaten her there. The boy closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and rubbed the back of his neck. After letting his breath out, he opened his eyes. He looked unharmed, as far as Adah could tell.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you,” Ekki said. “It didn’t hurt or anything. It just caught me by surprise. I didn’t know what to expect.”
“What happened?” Iris asked him, grasping his hand. “You looked like you caught a chill.”
“I kind of did,” he said, turning his eyes toward Adah. “When you poked the portal, it felt like someone tapped me on the back of the shoulder. Not physically, but in my mind. Like you were in my head, at the back of my consciousness. Kind of like talking through a magic channel, but way closer. It just scared me is all.”
“You could tell it was me?” Adah asked. “Or my presence, somehow? You recognized me?”
“Well, I knew it had to be you,” Ekki said. “Your magic or something. I mean, you were the only one touching the portal.”
“But you wouldn’t have known it was me if you didn’t know I was touching the portal, right?” Adah asked. “You couldn’t tell from the feeling alone?”
“Probably not,” Ekki said with a tilt of his head. “It was more like a vague sensation, from what I remember.”
“That’s… good,” Adah said, nodding slowly.
She hoped Ekki was remembering right.
That heartbeat she had felt in her scythe must have been Ekki’s. It felt like a human’s heartbeat, and of a power that probably corresponded to Ekki’s or, at least, that particular spell of his. Which meant that the chaotic pulsing she had felt when she stabbed the Cruelty portal must have been the energy of a Cruelty.
Or, more likely, lots of Cruelties.
If Adah could sense both Ekki’s power and the energy of the Cruelties when she pierced their portals, then both Ekki and the Cruelties could probably sense her.
If Ekki was right about not being able to identify her through the presence he felt in his mind, then that would likely be true for the Cruelties as well.
But they would have sensed someone.