He’d barely had a chance to thank Ianthe and her lesbian ninja team before a pair of women arrived and spirited him off up a winding staircase just inside the wall of the shaft. The apertures he’d seen from below were alcoves like arched windows; as they passed each one, he peered into it hoping to catch some glimpse of the outside, something to contextualize their ascent. Nothing but darkness in each, though, and he wondered what the point of these little inaccessible niches could possibly be.

“I’m Allie. I’m taking care of you while we get the orientation together. Hungry?” The woman who’d spoken was his height, pale-skinned, with straight brown-black hair framing her round face.

“I uh, maybe? I’m kind of still–”

“Freaking out. I get it. My recruitment wasn’t as dramatic as yours, but it’s still a lot to deal with, all at once. I mean, I got stuck just trying to figure out how tall this place is. They had to physically pull me out of the central shaft floor.” Allie grinned, with an ease and familiarity that told Riley she knew what she was doing; this was meant to be reassuring, she was trying to be disarming, this was someone who handled people professionally.

“Let’s go ahead and swing by a canteen — uh, those are kind of like restaurants but you–”

He nods and waves a hand. “Yeah, I know.”

“It’s a weird word. I dunno why we call it that. Anyway it’s just a place to grab some food. There’s one on the next level.”

The other woman, a pale ice-blonde, had been silent through this exchange, deferring to Allie, but in the pause that followed she spoke up. “I’m Nora. I’m with the Theory department.”

“Hi. Riley.”

“You represent an interesting situation, so I will be part of the orientation team, in case anything strange comes up.” Nora had an accent, something northern European, but Riley had no idea what it was. “But it’s mostly going to be Alexis–” She gestured at Allie, so now Riley knew what ‘Allie’ was short for. “And Therese, who you’ve already met, in a way.”

He frowned. “Was she one of the rangers? I don’t think I got all their names.”

Allie laughed. “No, she’s not a Ranger. She’s the diviner that found you in the first place. She says the two of you made eye contact.”

There was a girl, wasn’t there? His memories of that night were a fragmented jumble, shot through with fire and blood and agony. And then rain and darkness, but in that darkness, there had been a girl.

A girl, a room, a candle flame, gray eyes widening in surprise.

The rest of the memory crowded forward, trying to force its way into his mind. He squeezed his eyes closed as if, lacking sight, he’d be unable to see that terrible moment. His breath caught, and he stumbled on the stairs, caught himself on Allie’s outstretched arm.

“She– That was real?”

Nora sniffed, and Allie laughed. “Oh no, don’t get Nora started on ‘real’.” She waved a hand at her companion to hush whatever pedantry she’d been about to launch into. “You really saw a woman, right? Young, white, brown hair, uh… shit, what color are her–”

“Gray,” Riley supplied.

Allie beamed. “There you go. Yep, that’s Therese. She’s meeting with a couple of the Magisters right now, giving them everything she learned about you while keeping tabs on you. She’ll join us in a bit.”

The stairs passed into an archway and onto a landing, a short hall that opened beyond into another vast space inside the Tower’s central shaft. Kind of an extended balcony, large enough for dozens of tables and their attendant chairs, and a broad hallway radiating out from the central shaft and dove through the outer wall of the Tower and back into what looked like a series of rooms. The smell of food drifted in from that direction, and he realized that yes, in fact, spending all day in absolute terror and not even getting to eat the picnic lunch you’d brought with you to the park? Riley was starving.

Nora gestured to the hall. “Vegetarian okay?”

He nodded. “Sure, whatever.”

She glided off, unnaturally graceful. Allie watched her a moment, then grabbed his elbow and steered him over to a table. “So! Riley! Good to finally meet you.”

He started to open his mouth and she interrupted before he could speak. “I can’t answer most of your questions yet. There’s a whole routine that Headmistress Gaveny likes to go through, and that’s going to cover most of what you’ll want to know, and after that I can fill in the gaps.”

“Okay, but– look, Nora?” Allie nodded to indicate he’d remembered the name correctly. “Nora said I was an ‘interesting situation’. Captain Ianthe said I was ‘interesting’. But you all seem so blasé about all this magical shit, this place, this whole world–” He caught himself starting to get panicky, crushed it down hard, continued. “So like. What’s so interesting about me?”

Allie’s face had gone serious and she was nodding along as he spoke. “Yeah, interesting. Right, that’s gotta be weird, in the middle of all this down-the-rabbit-hole stuff, to get told you’re interesting. Like, compared to what, right?” She smiled again, and he nodded, unable to resist a slight smile himself.

She thought for a moment, and then continued. “Okay, so I would rather have Nora here for this, and after I explain, you’ll see why.” She looked him carefully up and down. “Notice anything about the people in the Tower that you’ve seen so far?”

He looked around the open balcony space, seeing two other groups of people at their own tables, and a handful of people on their own, reading or eating alone. “I guess… you’re all dressed kinda the same, but otherwise–”

She laughed a little. “Yeah, that’s true. Clothes are made in-house and Adept robes are pretty standard. But that’s not what I mean.”

Then it struck him. Lesbian ninjas. “You’re– There aren’t any men here. I mean, except me.”

Allie beamed, like a teacher proud of a particularly bright student. “Yup!”

“Is this like, a girls’ school, or are we in the girl part of the magical freaky city place?”

“This is a school for learning magic, right?”

He waved a hand as if to say ‘sure, whatever, I’ll accept that for now’.

“Only girls can use magic.”

He blinked, reviewed what she’d said, blinked again. “Only–”

“Girls. We’ve never had a case of a boy who could use magic. Or, to put it more properly, because Nora gets annoyed with me if I call it magic, only girls can call Sigils, break them, and use the power in a Working.”

He flashed to Ianthe: I need you to not call any more Sigils, okay?

He thought of the fractally branched pattern of light.

You’re interesting. Your case is interesting.

Something cold had gathered in the pit of his stomach, but he nodded along with Allie’s explanation; she continued. “I don’t know why, Theory — that’s one of our departments, I guess you figured that out already — doesn’t know why, Archives has no record of any boys with the ability to do it, and I know we’ve never trained a boy in at least the last hundred years, because someone started getting really obsessive about record keeping around then, and I’ve looked through the records.” She spread her hands. “So! Interesting.”

Before Riley could think of something else to say, Nora returned with a plate of sandwiches and drinks on a tray. “I thought I’d go with something simple for now? And just water, as well. I didn’t even think to ask about food allergies.”

Riley’s eyes hadn’t left the food yet, and Allie laughed. “Go ahead, Riley. We can talk more once you’re not about to die of starvation.

Riley grabbed one of the sandwiches and started eating. Mustard. Some kind of leafy thing. Peppers? It was all just a blur of flavors. While he chewed, Riley tried to put together the pieces of what he’d experienced so far.

Only girls.

# # #

Therese knew that Riley had arrived at the Tower without being told. There was a shift in the tenor of the meeting with the three Magisters who had appointed themselves case managers for the situation. Magisters were bound to the Tower in some way that didn’t entirely make sense to her, and they they seemed to have some insight from that bond that caused them to stir and mutter amongst themselves.

The three Magisters sat behind a long, rectangular table in the conference room near the highest accessible parts of the Tower. The room was gloomy, dark wood panels on every wall and light provided only by Worked lanterns that lit themselves only when the Magisters entered the room. Therese sat in a low chair a few feet back from the table; the Headmistress sat off at one end, flanking the session, where she could participate without being the focus of attention.

After a moment of hushed conversation, Magister Pérez interrupted Therese’s explanation of the reciprocal Working that she’d been party to, the thing that had linked Riley to her and given him a glimpse into the Tower. They’d been far more concerned about that oddity than they were about his being a boy. “Adept Lasalle. We’ll need to table this conversation, as fascinating as it is.” The magister’s voice was sweet and light, seeming out of place in her careworn, lined face. She had heard that some of the Council were as old as the school itself, which seemed implausible; the school went back ten centuries.

“Yes, Magister.” She was glad to be done with it; despite Nora’s explanation, she didn’t understand the theory behind reciprocal workings well enough to speak intelligently about it, and their questions were making her feel like her passing grades in Theory were perhaps unwarranted. And in any case, she was anxious to go downstairs and find out about this boy who had come here.

“The only matter that remains to us is to verify that the subject, Riley, is the one responsible for the portal Working.” That was from Magister Ivanova, and wasn’t directed at her at all. It was spoken lengthwise across the long table the three Magisters sat behind, at Headmistress Gaveny, who had been silent for quite a while. “I assume you’ll see to that in the initial interview?”

The Headmistress nodded. “It should be simple to establish. If he Worked, he’ll be able to identify the Sigil he broke, and we’ll know.”

Magister Pérez leaned forward, her attention still on Therese. “I would like you, Adept Lasalle, to be present for this interview. I recognize they are usually one-on-one meetings with the Headmistress, but I wish to see this from your eyes, in your subsequent report.”

The third Magister present, Magister River, hadn’t said anything the entire briefing, but now she stood. “Thank you for your time, Adept Lasalle, Headmistress Gaveny.” Her voice was a rich contralto, and Therese wondered if there was some kind of Working that gave it reverb. That would be such a silly trick, but if she were a Magister she’d totally do things like that.

The other two rose and, nodding to Therese and the Headmistress, all three Magisters filed out through the back entrance to the room. Once the door had closed behind them, the Headmistress exhaled as though letting tension drain from her, which was ridiculous, of course. The Headmistress was never tense or anything less than completely in control of the situation.

“Well.” She stood, leaving her fingertips on the surface of the table. “That went remarkably well.”

Therese blinked, managed not to gape at her. “You– You think so?” she said, uncertainty laced through her voice.

“They’ve agreed to let me attempt to train him. That was not at all certain.”

“You mean, they’d force us to seal him?” Sealing was what happened if you decided not to join the Tower. People couldn’t be allowed to go around damaging the fabric of reality in the Primary with uncontrolled Sigil-calling, so anyone who opted out was sealed. No more access to Sigils, and even their memories of the Tower would gradually fade into a half-remembered dream.

Gaveny laughed. “Oh, at least that. Magister Ivanova represents a faction within the Council that advocated simply killing him and leaving his body to the City.”

Therese’s gasp was audible, though she was trying hard to control her reactions around the always-restrained and sober Headmistress.

“Oh, I’d talked them down from that position before this meeting even began, of course. I wouldn’t countenance wasting any available talent, given the circumstances.” Which meant exactly nothing to Therese; what circumstances?

Gaveny continued. “At least he’ll be given the opportunity to fail, if that’s what’s going to happen. But I think he may surprise us.”

“I think… I think he’ll be okay here.”

“Oh? Is this a divination? Or simply a wish?”

“Neither. I think. I’m not sure.” She shook her head slightly to indicate her own confusion. “The reciprocal working gave me a sense of him, I suppose. A feeling? But it’s more than just a feeling. It’s more of a familiarity. Like I recognize him, though I’ve never met him.”

“You didn’t include any of this in your report.” The Headmistress didn’t seem critical; it was just an observation.

“Well, it’s all very ambiguous, isn’t it? Sort of…” She wobbled one hand back and forth in the air. “Wishy-washy? I don’t have data, I don’t have a Working to analyze, I don’t have anything except some kind of, uh, intuition? Like a gut feeling but one that came from outside of me.”

“This sounds like simple empathy after a divinatory connection, though. That’s been known to happen.”

“Yes, Headmistress. But… I don’t think it’s empathy, because I experienced his subjectivity, just for a moment, and… he hates himself. No way this feeling is an echo of that.” She had found such a lifeless husk inside Riley for that single moment of insight — like there was no person inside him to be perceived, like he was a simulacrum of a human, all imitative emotion and rehearsed body language.

The Headmistress frowned. “I want you to stay involved once he’s joined his cadre. Meet with him as you have time — not to the detriment of your other duties, of course — and track his progress, assuming there is any. It worries me, to think of training someone with the emotive qualities you describe, but talent is talent.”

Therese nodded. She’d planned to keep an eye on him regardless, but official instructions meant that she could schedule time under Headmistress Gaveny’s authority. Not that first-term Adept Diviners were all that burdened by work; Diviner Rajavi was, however, very enthusiastic about the need for constant training and meditative practice, which generally left very little free time for Therese to be squandering it on a novice.

Potential novice.

“Please go down and fetch our newest recruit, Therese. And bring…” Her eyes drifted, as though looking far away beyond the room’s wall. “Instructor Alexis and Theoretician Nora. Who are currently with him, in the first level’s canteen. I will await you in my office.”

“Ma’am.” Therese rose, bowed slightly, and scurried off.

# # #

After a handful of attempts at questions were rebuffed — Nora was much less forthcoming than Allie had been, and insisted that he wait until orientation — Riley fell into a pensive silence. None of this felt any more real than it had when he’d first fallen into darkness in the park, under the tree; if anything, the sense of dreamlike unreality had increased. Colors were too bright, edges were too sharp, and shadows were too black. Sitting with the view of the Tower’s endless central shaft overhead, and the murky echoes of conversations and hum of domestic noise from other platforms and other rooms above, it was extremely easy to feel like the central point of a spiraling vertigo. He let his eyes close, just to slow the rate of impossible sensations he had to deal with all at once.

In the darkness behind his eyelids, a pattern of faint traces of white light began to form, like an inverted lightning bolt, or a three-dimensional fractal tree of fire, impossibly complex and blurring at its edges with the sheer volume of its branchings and spreadings.

“Riley?”

The voice was new. It dispelled the vision gathering in his mind’s eye, and he snapped his eyes open to see

a girl, with grey eyes and brown hair, concern on her face, her lips parting to speak

“Therese,” he said automatically.

She started, surprised, but then nodded. “Yes, I’m Therese, from Divination.”

The two of them looked at each other, their eyes locked together, while Allie and Nora sat in somewhat uncomfortable silence. After a few seconds of this frozen tableau, Therese broke off the eye contact. “Headmistress Gaveny sent me to gather you. All of you–” she swept her hand to include Nora and Allie — “and bring you to her office.”

Her voice was familiar. He’d never heard it, as far as he knew. Not even that moment of contact in the darkness; he’d seen her mouth move but there had been no sound. She was shorter than he was expecting, a little shorter than he was. Her blue robes were more worn and faded than either Nora’s grey robes or Allie’s white, and he wondered if the ubiquitous robes represented a status symbol of some kind.

She was arresting. He couldn’t identify why. Nothing about her appearance was unusual. She wasn’t extremely attractive; she wasn’t particularly ugly, or strange to look at. She had no single feature to command attention. But when he looked directly at her, and especially when he made eye contact, it was something like a faint electrical current passing through his mind, like the faintest edge of a stimulant, the jitter that came with strong coffee. Looking at her was unsettling: he felt like his ease was disrupted, like he could not sit still.

Her occasional glances towards him and the speed with which she looked away made him suspect she was feeling the same thing he was. It wasn’t comfortable.

“Us as well? Unusual,” Nora said, and Allie got to her feet, gathered her small handbag.

“Probably she’s going to move right into orientation stuff. I dunno why she wants you there, Nora. Other than the obvious.”

Riley interjected. “Because I’m not a girl.”

Therese looked sharply at him, but her voice was calm. “Oh, they told you? Well, that’s probably a big part of it, yeah. This is new ground for all of us.” She was only thrown off her stride momentarily, and briskly continued. “So let’s head up. She’s in a good mood but why risk it, you know?”

Allie touched Riley’s shoulder. “It’s a bit of a climb. Are you going to be okay?” She’d noticed his limp. Neither of the other two women had. Despite wanting to keep all these people at arm’s length until he knew what the hell was going on, he was starting to like Allie. Her friendliness seemed genuine, not the carefully-staged companionship of a therapist or a family acquaintance.

“I– yeah, I should be fine. As long as I don’t have to run, or anything.” He made a pained face.

“The trip in from the City was exciting, I guess?” Allie grinned. “Personally, I stay here in my nice safe Tower with its nice comfy quarters. Rangers…” She shuddered theatrically. “No thanks.”

Therese hadn’t said anything, and still didn’t, but Riley was pretty sure she knew exactly how much his hip was aching. Nora, oblivious, looked concerned. “Is something physically wrong? We can stop at Medical–”

Riley waved his hand dismissing the idea. “I broke my hip a while ago. It aches if I walk too much. I’ll be fine.” Nora fell back into silence.

As the three of them ascended through the Tower, they passed through open areas, at a regular interval, each of them another semicircular platform intruding into the central shaft by fifty meters or so. Each platform was open above, lit by the fading orange light of the City’s sunset from the dome far overhead. Each platform had an exit to the stair that spiraled up, enclosed within the shaft wall. And each platform had a broad hall leading radially away from the Tower’s center, through the shaft wall, into a dark profusion of corridors and rooms beyond.

“How big is this place, anyway?”

Allie shrugged. “We don’t really know, actually. There always seems to be enough room. Explorations just lead you out into the upper areas of the Peripheral Tower. Rooftops, skybridges, stuff like that. There’s a project in my department to map the Tower itself, but they have to spend as much time updating the maps after any kind of uh…” She let her eyes flick over to him, but didn’t meet his gaze. “Any kind of event that makes the Tower shift around.”

He gave a slight grimace. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I still don’t know what I was doing.”

Nora spoke up. “Uncontrolled Sigil breaking, and a Working that was driven purely by intuitive patterns. The interesting thing, to me, is that you picked such a powerful Sigil to do it with. The uh, Keeper of the Final Word, I think?”

The Keeper of the Final Word of Causality, he thought, but the words didn’t mean anything to him, just noises from his memory. His look of blank incomprehension gave him away. “Sorry, I uh, I don’t know what any of that means. And I’m guessing you don’t want to tell me yet?”

Nora sighed. “No, I can’t. I would love to talk to you about that particular Working, but it will have to wait.”

Therese said, “Nora’s particular project is Sigil cataloguing. Which is basically Sisyphean, given the way Sigils work, but–”

“But someone must at least make the attempt. Like the mapping of the Tower. Like the Divining of the celestial.” Nora spoke with a careful wording that suggested she’d had this conversation before, with Therese, and that it had gone unsettled then, and would continue to do so now.

He considered this for a moment, and then decided to go for it. “Because it’s fractal?”

Nora stumbled slightly, and Allie laughed. “Oh dear. I think you’re going to give Nora a panic attack.”

Nora hissed, “You’ve seen it? The Tree?” He could hear the capital letter in her voice.

He started to answer, but Therese waved a hand. “Plenty of time to pick his brain later. Nora. You can drag him into Theory classes once he’s settled in and done the mandatory first-year work. You’re just going to confuse him now.”

Nora subsided, her face a mask of calm barely concealing irritation.

To change the subject, Allie dropped into a tour-guide sort of patter. “Okay, the first level was Supply and Logistics. They deal with moving everything around the Tower, and into the Tower, and out to the Periphery. They also handle all the stable portals we use to go to and from the Primary.” She pointed down at their feet. “Below us, in the center of the shaft, on that big mosaic floor? That’s a massive portal we can use if we need to get a lot of people to the Primary in a hurry. I’ve never seen it used, but there are records.”

They’d passed another open platform, and Allie waved a hand. “This is the Ranger floor. They work closely with Logistics, and there’s lots of back stairways and alternate passages between the two levels. Armory’s here too, so if you decide to get into Working objects into Charms, this is where that happens.”

Riley said, “I saw one of them in action, some kind of fire thing. Ranger, uh, Finley had it.” He was relieved he’d remembered the woman’s name.

Allie laughed. “Was she having fun? She loves field-testing new Worked weapons.”

“I think so? She kept talking about how terrified she was of it, but she was grinning the whole time.”

“Yeah, that’s her all over.” Allie’s voice held an affection that Riley thought might indicate a close friendship, but people weren’t exactly his strong suit. “Anyway, this next floor is Laboratories. Nora’s home. Theory’s home.”

He tried to imagine what a magical laboratory would look like and failed. Nora said, “It’s mostly offices, really. The actual specialized labs are uncommon. But when one is specifically needed, the Tower tends to… provide.”

They kept walking, Allie occasionally contributing more details about the places they were passing. Riley noticed that the women they encountered as they ascended were trying their best not to stare openly at him, but not a one of them passed by that didn’t notice and mark him. He could imagine their thoughts: that’s him, that’s the boy, that’s the only boy, that’s the strangeness that’s come to our home.

Feeling othered in this way was a familiar place for Riley. He didn’t ever fit in to any spaces, social or physical, and never had for his whole life. Not peer groups at school, not in the foster home, not in his parent’s house. He wasn’t one of the gang, or one of the boys. He wasn’t on the team, or part of a clique.

This was all just another part of his isolation, he realized. This weird place? It didn’t matter how weird the place was; the weirdest thing here was, as always, him. He hadn’t really expected anything different; even in his own bizarre fantasies, he was still an outsider. A simulation of humanity, unable to make real connections and belong.

He let his drifting thoughts return to the world around him. Allie was talking: “This is Academics. My home. You’ll see a lot of this level in the near future.” She smiled. “I’ll try to make it welcoming. This is where all the classrooms are, and the lecture halls, and our one auditorium. Not that we’ve used it much. The smaller theaters are usually more than enough for the various drama clubs to put on their plays.”

“Clubs?” Somehow, Riley hadn’t imagined that a magic school would have extracurriculars. But it made sense; people had interests outside of whatever they might be learning in school, he supposed, whether the material was calculus or magical theory.

Allie nodded. “There’s dozens of them, and they’re always schisming and reuniting. There’s a whole bizarre politics with the clubs. I don’t know; I’m only in the Cooking club, and that’s just because–”

Therese interjected, “She’s the only person here who’s any good as a pastry chef, and it turns out that’s a skill that’s kinda in demand.”

Allie giggled. “I like making tarts and cakes and things. And nobody else was willing to do it, so I joined the Cooking club to get access to their storerooms.”

“Don’t let her tell you she doesn’t know about club politics. She’s the vice president,” Nora said, amusement in her voice.

“I just want to make cakes,” Allie said in a mock whine. “Why is everyone so mean to me about it?”

They ascended another floor. “Residences. Oh! Key!”

The girl that met them from the archway of the now-expected broad radial hall was Black, shorter than any of them except Therese, and had her hair in rows and rows of careful braids, all tied back together, tinkling as the tiny beads woven into their tips clicked together.

Key spared Riley only a moment’s glance before taking Allie by the hand and giving her a kiss on the cheek. Only then did she turn to face him. “This is Riley?”

“Yep. Riley, this is Key. She’s in Archives.” They were still holding hands, and Key leaned in to bump Allie’s shoulder with her own. “Key, meet Riley, potential recruit and future Novice.”

“Hey,” Key said. “It’s been pretty wild here since you Portaled in.”

“Uh, sorry, I think?”

Key laughed. “Don’t be. Some people get here through a careful, controlled contact protocol. Other people tear a hole in the world and thunder through. You’re not even in the top five most disruptive arrivals. I’ve seen the records.”

Riley was oddly comforted by this. He’d been unconsciously carrying a tension about whether he’d caused some particularly catastrophic problem by his arrival. It would be perfectly in keeping with the course of his life for him to arrive at a strange magical land and immediately break things and give everyone a reason to be angry at him. He’d still basically done that, but apparently not to any great or notable degree. Unless Key was just being kind.

“We gotta go, Key. On our way to see Gaveny.”

Therese said, “Headmistress Gaveny, Allie.”

“Anyway, wanna get dinner later? Assuming I’m not going to be with Riley all evening?”

Key nodded, and Allie leaned in to kiss her. Then they parted, and the group continued up the stairs.

“That was Residences, like I said. I’ll take you to your room later. Uh, that is, if you decide to join us. I’ve kind of been assuming this whole time, which is probably rude of me.”

Riley shrugged. “Hell if I know. I haven’t heard the pitch yet.”

Allie grinned. “Well, I’m going to keep acting like you’ll be staying, because otherwise I wouldn’t need to be here, right? I do training, not escorts back to the Primary.”

Up another flight. “Archives, which is basically all our libraries, but it’s also where a lot of the weird artifacts that have turned up are kept. There’s vaults and art galleries, too. Study rooms and offices. Key works here.” The little smile on Allie’s face was an unconscious reflection of how thinking about Key made her feel. “I think the archives go back a few hundred years, that we’ve catalogued and indexed, and then there’s just piles of stuff from even older that we’re still working through.”

“Like the maps, or that other stuff you mentioned?” Riley directed this to Nora, who nodded. “Seems like everywhere you look, there’s unfinished work.”

Nora nodded again. “Most of it unfinishable, really. Very perceptive.”

“You see that look in her eye, Riley? You’ve whetted her appetite and she’s going to be trying to recruit you into Theory. She’s implacable. She’s unstoppable. She’s–”

“She’s being very patient with your nonsense, Alexis.” Nora’s voice was so proper and prim that all three women burst into giggles. Riley smiled, though he didn’t feel like this was a joke meant to include him. Outsider.

Therese said, after a moment, “This is also where Divination is. My department.”

Allie nodded. “Diviners end up writing a lot of reports, and Archives ends up filing those reports. It’s fun, like the circle of life, only for paperwork.”

They ascended once more.

“Here’s Administration, and this is where we’ll be turning.”

Riley noticed the platform here was furnished with elegant, soft-looking velvet covered sofas and chairs, and rugs were spread on the ground. Being at the top had privileges, he supposed. The radial hallway that led directly away from the landing platform was wood-paneled, dark, and carpeted as well. He wondered who cleaned the carpets.

The Headmistress’s office was the second door on the left of the broad hallway. The heavy door opened into an antechamber, which featured a desk for an assistant (unoccupied), a sofa for waiting (also unoccupied), and a single door on the opposing wall. This door now opened, and the tall, elegant, severe woman who opened it said, “Hello, Riley Hawkins. Welcome to the Tower. Won’t you come in?”

# # #

“This conversation will happen in two parts. After we have discussed your current situation, you will be asked to make a decision. The rest of this conversation will depend on that decision.”

Therese hadn’t heard the Tower pitch since she was a recruit herself. Having someone observing the process was, like the Magister said, unusual. She was trying to take mental notes, but she had no idea what Magister Pérez was hoping she’d see, so mostly this meant she was noting how Riley’s body language and facial expression changed in response to the things the Headmistress was saying.

“If you mean, do I want to stay here? I do.”

Headmistress Gaveny allowed a thin smile onto her lips. “Regardless, we will be covering the full explanation of what that means. And then we’ll be discussing the particulars of your unique situation.”

Riley’s arms were wrapped around himself and his shoulders hunched slightly forward: a defensive posture, a closed-off posture. Therese supposed it was hard to be open and enthusiastic while being lectured in one of the most intimidating rooms in the entire Tower — a structure filled with intimidating and even frightening rooms — by the woman whose authority over the place was near absolute. She’d probably had similar body language, herself, come to think of it.

“There was a time when people with our talent came to knowledge of themselves and their place in the cosmos in an undirected, chaotic fashion. Experimentation, failure, and occasionally catastrophe were the norm. It was an extremely dark time, and most of those who survived it did enormous damage to themselves, their communities, and the world around them.

“Make no mistake; we use diminutive language like ‘magic’ to refer to what we are capable of, because it is far more comfortable to imagine a children’s tale than to call it what it is: the power to rewrite the rules and properties of reality itself, vested in fallible humans, typically before their age of majority. There have been disasters. History is littered with them.”

Therese had wondered which disasters this bit of the introduction referred to, and when she’d gotten access to the Archives, she and Key had gone looking. The big ones, the ones people had heard of, were not nearly as surprising as the dozens of secret catastrophes that had become mythology, or had been concealed entirely. The story that inspired legends about Atlantis was horrifying.

“What you’re able to do — what we suspect you’re able to do–” At this the Headmistress shot a glance across to Therese — “we refer to as calling a Sigil, and then breaking a Sigil to obtain the power held within it, and then Working to use that power to manipulate reality around you. In theory, there is no limit to what can be managed with this power.” She paused to give additional weight to her next words. “In theory, you could destroy the world with it.”

Riley rocked back slightly on his chair, and noticing this, Gaveny let the thin smile back onto her face. “Oh, we’d intervene long before that happened. In fact, that sort of intervention was the original purpose of this Tower and those who live here. The school is, in a sense, a preventative version of that original mission.

“We do not exist to train you to use ‘magic’, Riley. We exist to make you safe. For yourself and for the world.”

She leaned against her desk, allowing her hands to unclasp from behind her back. Therese knew that the casual posture was meant to disarm and welcome, but she could see that even now there was still tension held in the Headmistress’s arms, where they braced her on the desk. Was she worried about this meeting?

“When you leave this Tower, you will either be trained to the satisfaction of the instructors here, or you will be sealed.”

Riley froze for a moment, having heard the implied capital letter in the word. “Which means what?”

“Blocked from access to the celestial. Unable to call or even perceive the Sigils. Unable to perform workings.” She paused. “Made safe.”

This had clearly not occurred to Riley as a possibility; his expression became abstract, distant, and thoughtful. Give up whatever madness this Tower and City represented, go back to the world as it was before he’d done whatever he’d done to arrive here, back to a world of simple rules and comprehensible events.

She was certain she knew what he’d decide, but still the notion warred with his curiosity across his face.

“That is the choice we’re offering you right now. If you choose to leave, we will return you to the Primary, your talent sealed off, and gradually your memories of this place will fade until it all seems like a half-remembered dream. You will be free to seek whatever sort of life you prefer.” She pushed upright from the desk, folding her hands loosely before her. “Or, you may choose to stay with us. You will be committing to a minimum of one year of training, to be able to live with your talent responsibly. You will be agreeing to be bound to the Tower, and to the laws and strictures it represents. And you will be given the opportunity to continue past that first year, to further your study, to learn more about this place and the powers that undergird it.”

The look on Riley’s face sharpened and he half-opened his mouth to speak. In his hesitation, Gaveny interrupted: “This is not a small decision, Riley Hawkins. This will change your life entirely. Even those who opt to spend only a year with us are forever a part of this Tower and our organization. These bonds are lifelong.”

Riley shook his head. “I know that’s supposed to make me nervous, right?” He waved his hands in front of him as though miming the clearing away of cluttered thoughts. “I guess for someone else the idea of going back to their old life would be tempting. Pretending they had a weird dream or whatever.”

Gaveny nodded. “More than a third of those we contact make that choice.”

“Huh.” The corner of his mouth curled up. “I would have guessed more. But I have kind of a low opinion of people.”

They were silent for a few seconds while Riley chewed absently at the inside of his cheek. Finally he shook his head again, more definitive this time. “It’s just that… I’ve got nothing to go back to. I’ve been marking time. Waiting for my life to start, or end, or something.” He looked up, met Therese’s gaze, then Gaveny’s. “This seems like a little of both.”

The Headmistress nodded, and Therese released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. They did send a third of the recruits home with a nice dream; why had she been so invested in Riley’s choice?

“I need you to say the words, Riley Hawkins.”

He took a breath, then exhaled all at once, and said, “Okay. Yes. I want to stay.”

“Excellent.” Gaveny clapped her hands once, and then relaxed into her chair. The moment Riley had spoken, the tenor of the conversation changed, from cautious to welcoming. Not that the Headmistress was a portrait of hearty bonhomie; she was still austere and imposing. But now she was perceptibly on your side, she was your Headmistress, and there was something comforting about that knife-blade of a persona directed on your behalf, rather than in opposition to you.

“There is one additional matter that we must cover, the nature of which I’m sure has been revealed to you, intentionally or otherwise.”

“I’m not a girl.” Riley’s eyes were down again, and Therese could see a muscle in his jaw twitch.

“Precisely. Before we continue, we must ensure that the… performances we’ve seen already are genuinely your own. You’ve had a celestial bond with Adept Lasalle,” and at this she gestured at Therese, “and we wish to establish that it was not through that bond that you were able to call a Sigil.”

“Okay? What do I do?”

“Nothing, for now. Therese, if you would be so kind as to reestablish your telltale?”

Therese nodded, and concentrated. Sigil calling was never a casual or trivial matter, but the focus it required of her now was nothing compared to the terrors of failing for days and days to envision even the simplest Sigils as a new Novice.

She sketched a symbol in her mind, a single line of white fire followed by two more, branching, and then a loop at the tip of one branch. Answers Found in Heartbreak, she whispered, naming the Sigil, and it burst into her mind, living and burning. Answers was her preferred Sigil for divination, when she had the luxury of choice, and bringing it into herself was almost comfortable by now. She held it, letting it burn and begin to unravel her identity, and then with a kind of regret she shattered it back into the component lines she’d used to sketch it.

A rush of painful fire flooded her inner world, and before it could pass through and out of her, she quickly structured her thoughts into the pattern of a Divinatory working: what she called a ‘telltale’, a kind of magical eavesdropper, that she quickly knotted to herself and to the boy on the chair in front of her. Huh. That was even easier than usual. Like the Working was drawn to him, almost.

At once, she began to sense him, sense his proximity and the tension in his arms and thighs and the odd mix of fatalism and excitement that scurried around in his mind. She could feel the walls he’d built to seal away his emotions and protect him from the outside world, and she knew she could not possibly penetrate them with just the little power of Answers Found in Heartbreak. Whatever he had locked away down there, he had structured his entire identity to guard and keep hidden.

But a deep dive into his subconscious wasn’t the objective of this working, so she opened her eyes and nodded to the Headmistress. “Okay, it’s active.”

Riley had been watching her closely the whole time, she realized, hoping to see some of what she had done, to recognize it or replicate it or even just understand it. She could sense his disappointment that the whole process had passed him by without any sign visible to his unaided perception, beyond the briefly whispered name, pitched below where he could hear it. She suppressed a smile; Working was largely a private thing, and it took a lot of training and discipline to see another person’s Workings in action.

Training and discipline which the Headmistress, of course, had in sufficiency. Therese felt the gentle but insistent tug of another mind at the edges of her Working, and surrendering to it, she felt a momentary disorienting sense of doubling, and then the Headmistress was present in her Divination, observing but not taking control of it.

“Riley. I am going to speak a name, and I want you to let your mind clear, and envision whatever comes into your thoughts when I speak this name.”

He nodded. “Okay. You want me to, like, free associate or something? Like, tell you the first word that comes to mind?”

Gaveny gave a tiny laugh. “It will not be necessary for you to speak, should things go as expected. Therese’s Working will be more than enough.”

“Okay, shoot.” Riley’s posture was performatively relaxed in the chair, but through the telltale Working, Therese — and by extension, Gaveny — could sense his nervous energy, his tension, his anticipation.

Headmistress Gaveny spoke, and the words hung like flat echoless snare drum strikes in the suddenly still air of the office. “The Sightless Gaze Behind the Eye of the Sun.”

At once, the telltale flooded with sensation. And it was all entirely wrong.

# # #

“Okay, shoot.” Riley had no idea what was meant to happen, if he wasn’t supposed to free associate. Did they think he’d have some kind of an emotional breakdown if he heard whatever this name was? Was this some part of the magic he’d supposedly been performing?

The Headmistress seemed to be bracing for something at least moderately dramatic, so Riley was too. His memory of the previous times he’d wandered into the darkness and come out the other side somewhere else was just blurred sense impressions, flashes of imagery. Red topographical maps of reality. He realized he was clenching his hands into fists, pressed down into the worn fabric of the chair’s seat upholstery.

“The Sightless Gaze–”

Riley’s vision was flooded with white fire.

“–Behind the Eye–”

The white fire receded, collapsing down into jagged burning white lines that traced a branching inverted lightning bolt, fragmenting upwards like a tree. Beyond this fiery tree was only darkness.

“–of the Sun.”

Dimly, Riley became aware of the presence of others within the darkness; tiny sparks of awareness somewhere behind him. She briefly wondered if they could survive what was coming, or if they’d be extinguished in the flood of fire that was to come.

There, at the tip of one of the branches of the tree of fire, a distinct symbol sketched from the white light: a circle, overlapping another circle, with a line inscribed through both, hooked at one end, with fractal branches of circles and lines spiraling out from the hook.

I am the Sightless Gaze Behind the Eye of the Sun.

Riley tried to hear her own thoughts in the catastrophic noise of the thundering voice, sliced out from the greater background noise of the clap of explosive cacophony that rolled out from the whole tree of fire, overwhelming, filling every aural space

We are One.

No, she tried to protest. No, I am not you! I am–

You called Me. You perceived Me. I am the fate chosen for You. I am the destination towards which You inevitably proceed. I am the end of Your dreams.

She screamed in her mind, feeling her identity peeling back like layers of skin under a blowtorch, crisping and shriveling, curling away from the raw flesh beneath, but the skin was Self and the flesh beneath was her identity, her sanity–

One of the two sparks of identity floating behind her moved closer, inasmuch as ‘closer’ could be said to have meaning in a place that seemed entirely composed of metaphors. Riley, listen. You have to break the Sigil. You cannot hold it in this way. It is destroying you.

None of this made sense to her, and she found herself curling inwards, knees up, fetal, her hands clutching her head to try to keep it from shattering under the pressure.

Now We act together. Become. It is time for Us to become.

The voice was so much, Riley convulsing and shaking at each word, like it was a wave-form traveling through her body, each explosion of something that wasn’t precisely sound visible in the twisting and contortions that wracked her.

Riley. You have to listen to me. The Sigil will consume you if you don’t. You need to imagine the circles separating. You need to imagine the line breaking free from them. You need to–

You need to Become.

Riley had the dimmest sensation of a flood of power sweeping the two spark-awarenesses away, scouring them clear of the non-space in which she floated, leaving only her and the Tree, and the Sightless Gaze.

Two circles, overlapping. A line through them, ending in a hook. Filling her vision and burning itself into her mind–

Our mind

–she imagined them pulling apart, becoming separated, the line between them stretching, tenuous–

No; we are One

–the line pulling free like a sword drawn from two bodies, bloodless, and then freed, spilling fragments of lines and curls and little bits of fractal branches that recapitulated the Sigil and, examined closely enough, the whole Tree–

the Sigil broke.

Riley thrashed under the ocean of burning that spilled out from the moment of breaking, and it consumed her.

# # #

Therese had lost track of what was happening along her telltale; it was a jumble of images, sensations of exultation and pain, and a rising panic that she knew wasn’t her own. She felt like she was listening to a concert by pressing a glass up against the wall of an adjacent room. Just the impressions of noise and the loudest of the peaks were coming through her crude instrument.

Gaveny spoke into her mind. Therese. I am going to have to perform a working, and you are going to have to shunt a very large amount of celestial power to me, or else Riley — and perhaps you as well — are going to be badly hurt by what’s about to happen.

Therese’s mouth went dry. She knew the theory of manipulating celestial power in the way the Headmistress was asking her to. She’d never done it. It was one of those things that simply never came up; each Adept was taught to handle her own Sigils and her own working, to the limit of what power she could personally wield.

I think I can– yes, okay. Yes. Got it. There weren’t really any other options, were there?

Gaveny’s voice in her mind again: I have complete confidence in you, Adept Lasalle.

Then she continued, but Therese could tell it wasn’t addressed to her. Riley, listen. You have to break the Sigil.

Therese strained to perceive Riley through the telltale. Could he even hear Gaveny’s words? It seemed to her like the Headmistress was shouting into a maelstrom.

Gaveny continued. You cannot hold it in this way. It is destroying you.

Holding a Sigil was dangerous, because it represented a fundamental template of reality, a Platonic form of a concept that described one tiny fragment of the rules by which the cosmos operated. Something so fundamental had no room in it for any of the messy complexity of a human mind. So it tried to rewrite you, rebuild you into an expression of whatever incomprehensible principle it represented.

When a Sigil succeeded, when the Adept couldn’t or wouldn’t break it and use the released celestial power to drive a working, the result was called a demon. And demons would cheerfully tear apart everything and everyone nearby in the pure madness of their foundational Sigil concept. Demons meant death, for the Adept and potentially for many, many others nearby. They were conduits directly to the celestial.

Therese balked. How could Riley have called on a Sigil strongly enough to even be at risk of possession? Demonic summons were the sort of thing that came up in scary stories told in Theory class; they required the Adept to wield phenomenal amounts of power, at a level out of reach of any Novice.

Then it sunk in that Gaveny was asking her to act as a conduit for a demonic possession level of celestial power. Fuck.

Gaveny again: Riley. You have to listen to me. The Sigil will consume you if you don’t.

Dimly, Therese was aware that Riley was convulsing, each spasm coming at an interval, and he was falling from the chair, curling up on the ground of the office.

She went through mental exercises to clear herself, just as she would before a Divination. This was basically the same thing. This was just like a Divination, where she would let the celestial energy in and let it pass back out and only dip her hand lightly in the stream of power as it flowed by.

Gaveny spoke in her mind again. You need to imagine the circles separating.

Therese was suddenly aware that she didn’t even know the Sightless Gaze. Where the hell had he learned it? She had only a dim memory of one of the Archive’s catalogues, a mention of it in the Goetia of Stars. Something with circles and lines.

She braced herself, mentally; if Riley was following instructions, this is when it would start to happen.

You need to imagine the line breaking free from them.

More convulsions from Riley, on the floor. Was he even hearing the Headmistress? Oh shit, if they had to deal with a demon, what the hell was she going to do–

You need to–

Then Therese could see the Sigil, filling her, tearing at her little working, consuming it, ripping it open. Fuck, this thing was big. Gaveny’s voice had vanished in the torrent of power spewing from the telltale. Therese could feel it starting to unravel, and she desperately clutched at its knotted ends, holding on, trying to keep it open, feeling like she was hanging onto a shredded sail on a ship in a hurricane.

The Sigil broke, and the flood of fire spilled through Riley and into her. She almost forgot what to do, almost stood in its way, frozen in the panic of the moment like a rabbit in the road.

Then she submitted, opened herself, relaxed her grip on the telltale working, and let the power sluice through her. It was painful, and she could feel the edges of her soul straining, aching with the effort of keeping clear of the raging fire.

Nearby, she could feel Gaveny Working a simple knot, something called a grounding, which did nothing more than empty the celestial power back into the cosmos. One of the first things Novices learned, so they could practice the call-and-break operation of Sigil use without affecting the world around them, which typically included the instructor and their fellow students — none of whom would appreciate whatever nonsense the Novice might cook up in a panic.

The grounding took the flood of power, and Therese could feel it seeping into the Tower all around her.

Far above, there was the sound of thunder. Oh, yes. This was going to be one huge fucking celestial storm.

And then it was over. Riley spasmed a few more times, gently, and then went limp. Therese kept the telltale open just long enough to feel his heartbeat and ragged breathing, and then with a deeply-drawn breath, she loosed the knots and let the working slip away. She was trembling, her hands aching where her nails had bitten into her palms, her hair slick with sweat and her robe clinging to her, hot and damp.

Headmistress Gaveny was, of course, unruffled and calm. “That was extremely instructive.”

“It–” Therese coughed to clear her throat, which was filled with spit and phlegm. “It was?”

“Oh yes. I think I can confidently say that Riley will be eminently trainable, regardless of sex.” She had a smug undertone of satisfaction that Therese couldn’t parse. “But for now, help me move him to the couch, so that he can sleep off the remainder of that experience.”

Therese looked baffled, and Gaveny tipped her head towards the fallen boy. “My dear Adept Lasalle, I still have to complete his orientation.” She smiled, and Therese laughed, clapping her hands to her face, the absurdity of it allowing all the tension to finally drain out of her.

“Okay. I’ll get his ankles.”

# # #

“I still can’t remember any of what happened, though.” Riley was sitting in the corner of the couch in the Headmistress’s office, tucked in between the back and the arm, his legs up and in front of him, defensively, his arms wrapped around his shins.

“The specifics aren’t relevant. If anything, knowing details would likely make the process of training and education more difficult, rather than less.” Gaveny was sitting in the chair that Riley had previously occupied, out from behind her desk, pulled up closer to him.

“But you figured out whatever it was you needed to know.”

“I did.”

“And you gave me a huge headache.”

“That was not precisely the plan, but it’s also unsurprising. Do you feel well enough to continue, or should we postpone this until you’ve rested further?”

Riley shook his head, though slowly and with care. “No, let’s get on with things. The ibuprofen’s kicking in already, and I’m really very ready to get to the part where I get to ask questions.”

The door opened. Therese entered and closed it carefully behind her, and then took up one of the overstuffed armchairs that lined the wall opposite the couch on which Riley sat. She waved to him but didn’t speak. She had a glass of water, which she sat down on a side table. She looked exhausted, he thought, but he supposed he probably did too, given how many places he ached and how hot his eyes felt.

“Very well. First of all, as you’ve agreed that you’ll be remaining with us, let me formally welcome you, Novice Hawkins, to the Celestial Academy of the Tower in the Final City.” She gestured around her office expansively, as though it was the entire Tower in scale, spread out before him.

“Uh. Thanks.” He resisted the urge to pointedly look around the room he’d already been sitting in for some time. No reason to be a smart-ass, really, other than ingrained habit.

“The Academy has, for the past thousand years, identified young women who possess the talent to see and manipulate the underlying forces of our shared meta-reality. We bring these young women here, and if they’re willing, we teach them to control those forces, to use them constructively, and to do so safely and with the interests of their fellow Sisters in the Tower, and the world at large, kept always in mind.”

Riley had been nodding along, and here he interjected. “You teach girls magic.”

Gaveny’s smile returned, though a bit thinner. “Bluntly, yes.” She brushed her sleeves as though to remove dust. “Our program is a minimum of one year; at the end of that year, a Novice is sufficiently skilled to pose no threat to those around her, and she may choose to part from the Tower at that time.”

“How many do?”

Gaveny looked momentarily derailed by the interruption. “Excuse me? Oh, yes. Perhaps a quarter of the girls who choose to remain in the Tower for training leave after the first year. They form an extended network of contacts and reliable agents in the Primary, which is to say Earth.”

That seemed like a lot. He wondered if it was the difficulty of the program, or if it was just a desire to get back to their old lives, abandoned for the past year. If you’d been doing something, on some kind of career trajectory or getting a degree that was your real passion, he could definitely see wanting to just do the basics and move on. The other option, the ‘forget everything’ Men In Black option, made his skin crawl, and he’d dismissed that one immediately, but being able to leave without weird memory tampering after just a year seemed reasonable.

She waited to see if he had follow-up questions, but he just nodded once in acknowledgement, and so she continued. “After that first year, there are two more years of Adept training, after which time the Novice is promoted to Adept, and encouraged to choose one of our departments to join, matching her particular interests and aptitudes. For instance, Therese is an Adept of the Divination department, and has chosen to specialize in celestial exploration. I am an Adept of the Academics department; really more of a glorified administrator than anything, but Academics also studies the Tower itself.”

He’d already heard about the other departments, he thought. They all seemed pretty self-explanatory. He nodded again, gestured for her to continue.

“Each department has its own program for training new Adepts, and those differ from one to the next. As you may imagine, the training for a Ranger Adept is quite a bit different to the training for a Theory Adept. You have, I assume, seen a fair amount of the former in the past day.”

Gaveny stood, and circled back around her desk to stand next to her own chair. “Each Novice is assigned to a group, a cadre within her cohort, which is comprised of all the girls we’ve recruited that year, and who have agreed to join us to be trained. Cadres learn together, live together, practice together, and generally develop bonds of friendship and mutual support that last beyond their time in our academic program. You will be assigned to a cadre; tomorrow, you will be introduced to them, and assigned a bed within their dormitory.”

She’d been sorting through a stack of papers, and seemed to have found what she was looking for; she held it up to read it more closely. “You’ll fill that cadre’s roster, bringing it to four, which means you will also officially begin your training and education this week, as the other first-year cadre has been complete and ready to begin for almost a month, and we do not want to delay them any longer.

“Now would be an appropriate time to ask questions, if you have them.”

Riley leaned back and lowered his feet to the floor. “You kept saying ‘girl’ and, well. What’s my deal, here? Why am I here?”

Gaveny nodded. “The obvious first anomaly. You are, to all appearances, not a girl. The truth is… we don’t know what that means. It is unprecedented.” She met his eyes for a moment, then looked aside, as though in thought. “With Therese’s assistance earlier, I was reassured that you are, in fact, talented in the way that we expect to see in those we recruit. Substantially reassured, to tell the truth.”

He wondered what ‘substantially’ meant, here. Given how exhausted Therese looked, he found himself again prodding at the blank space in his memories where the events of the past half hour should be. What had happened? What had he done? Why was Therese avoiding making eye contact with him?

“Okay, sure, good, but that’s not really what I’m thinking about here.” He spoke slowly, picking his way through his sentences. “You’re talking about basically stuffing me into a dorm room full of girls. I mean, I dunno how relaxed you all are here in… wherever this is, but I’m thinking they might not all be comfortable with that.” Jesus, thinking about it, he wasn’t comfortable with it. The thought of anyone looking at him while he changed clothing or slept filled him with a kind of sick dread, never mind a bunch of women his age doing so.

“I’ve given that some consideration, and I have a solution. When a cadre finishes their first year, we move them to one of the suites, where each girl has her own room — small, functional, but private. As an allowance for your unique circumstance, we will place you in the suites this year, rather than next. Will this be sufficient for you?”

He felt like an asshole, both for asking for special consideration and also for the implication that hung between them, that he might not be safe to be around young women, by simple fact of his sex. It was a familiar feeling, though; he’d spent a lot of time living with the sensation of being a particularly gendered burden on those around him, and he was able to move past it with the ease of long practice. He nodded. “Yeah, sure, I mean. If everyone else is okay with it.”

Across the room, Therese snorted. “They’re living in communal bunks right now. Immediately moving to private rooms? Yeah, I think they’ll be okay with it. The communal rooms aren’t exactly comfortable and spacious.”

“Indeed, though that is somewhat by design.” Gaveny brought her eyes back to his. “We’ll make certain changes to preserve some of the austerity we seek in the first year, but I believe everyone will be amenable, as Therese has indicated.”

“Okay… so can I also ask, I guess, big picture questions?”

The Headmistress nodded. “I assume you mean about this place, the Tower and the City.”

“Well, for starters, yeah. What the hell is this place? Not the Tower, I mean; I want to know that, too, but every time someone says ‘The Primary’ I’m… stumbling over the cosmology of it all?”

Therese covered her mouth, in his peripheral vision; he could tell she was hiding a grin or a laugh. She noticed his glance, waved her other hand. “It’s nothing. I was just thinking that ‘stumbling over the cosmology’ is like my entire job description here.”

Gaveny allowed a tiny smile to creep into the corner of her mouth. “Indeed, that’s largely what many of our departments actually do, when considered at a high level.” She looked away, thinking. “Let me begin with a caveat: everything I’m about to tell you is conjecture. Some of it is very strongly suggested by the available evidence, but we are, after all, talking about magic, and certainty isn’t entirely within our grasp. For example, until quite recently, one of the things I might tell you in this conversation is that manipulation of celestial energy is only available to women. And you can see for yourself how certain that turned out to be.”

Riley nodded. “Still. Any explanation’s better than just, uh, handwaving and bullshit, I guess?”

“Indeed, and we can do better than that.” She pressed her hands down onto her desk. “This place, the Tower, is a possibly-sapient magical construct. It reacts to outside stimulus. The Magisters — our governing body, though that’s a simplification — each make some sort of agreement with the Tower on becoming a Magister. No, I don’t know what that agreement entails; they don’t share, and it’s possible they’re magically incapable of sharing.”

“Does it… speak?”

“Perhaps to them. It has never spoken to me. Though it can make its will known in other ways; it was quite alarming when you, for instance, chose to locally reverse gravity.”

“I didn’t–”

She waved a hand. “I’m aware. Don’t concern yourself about it. There were no lasting consequences, aside from a minor concussion and other assorted injuries among the Ranger team. The point was merely to illustrate that the Tower has reactions to certain stimuli, and excessive Working within the City is one of those reactions.”

“Doesn’t that make this a really shitty place to teach magic?”

“In fact, it is quite the opposite. The Tower cleans up reality-altering mistakes. It tries to maintain a kind of metaphysical status-quo. Your gravity reversal was undone almost immediately after you created the working, and the only lasting effect was that the Tower did a bit of revising to the world around itself, and spun up the beginning of a celestial storm.”

Riley’s head swam with the influx of information, and he paused for a moment to decide which of the many threads before him to pull on next. “Okay. So, um. What’s a ‘Working’?” You keep using it as a noun, and I’m guessing from context it’s like, a spell?”

“Therese?”

Therese, who had been listening and occasionally nodding, was startled to be called on, but dropped into a kind of good-student persona instantly. “A Working is a set of guidelines for the diffusion of celestial potential safely back into reality, which may cause alterations to that reality as it does so.” This was all clearly rote. She continued, in a more normal voice. “We get celestial power and funnel it through a Working to do stuff. So yeah, basically it’s a spell.”

“How do you uh, ‘get celestial power’, then?”

Therese shot a glance at the Headmistress, who nodded. “Um, so, I’m going to say some stuff that you should absolutely not do right now, okay? Like, even in your head. We don’t really want to piss the Tower off this many times in one day, or uh… some of the other bad things that could happen. To you.”

Riley felt a spider of ice skitter up his spine. Jesus, just talking about it was scaring her.

“So there’s these things called Sigils, okay? They have interesting names which apparently come from the Sigils themselves, and no, I don’t know how that works. They’re like magical symbols. You envision them in your mind — and do not do this right now, okay — and that calls them to you. Then, once you’ve got one of them embedded in your mind, you take it apart.”

“Okay… uh, what’s the point of this?”

Therese shook her head. “I’m not going to explain the theory and everything to you. That’s why we have a whole department and classes and so forth. Anyway, I’d get it wrong. You do this and it makes a bunch of celestial power, which you need to get rid of. Like electrical charge, I guess. Don’t hold me to that; I know absolutely nothing about real science.”

“And that’s the Working.”

“Right. The Working is how you get rid of the power. Or you don’t, and it grounds out of you into reality without being controlled, and depending on what Sigil you called down, you die horribly.”

Gaveny interjected. “Or you don’t, because we do this in the Tower, and the Tower grounds the excess celestial power itself, saving you from a messy fate.”

Therese nodded. “Right, which is why the whole thing happens here.”

Riley considered this for long enough that Therese began to stir with the anticipation of the end of the conversation. Then he spoke again. “So uh. Where’s ‘here’?”

Gaveny sighed. “That’s a difficult question to answer. I will give you what we know for certain, and then I will share my own speculation, but you will find as many competing theories as there are Adepts in the Tower.”

Therese said, “More. Nora has three different theories all on her own.”

“Precisely the problem. This is what we know: The Tower seems to be the center of the City. The further you get from the Tower, the more sparse the City becomes. It never, as far as we’ve been able to travel, completely ends; even in the badlands five hundred kilometers from the Tower, there are still ruined buildings half-buried in the packed earth. But the Tower seems to be the center, or at least the point of greatest density; there is an ocean, fifty kilometers away from here, and the City doesn’t extend more than ten kilometers out onto its surface, with pontoons and houseboats and piles driven into the shallow muck.”

“But… why? I mean, who built it?”

“We don’t know. The current commonly held belief is that the Tower is itself building the City. A significant minority believes there are, or were, Builders, and those Builders also constructed the Tower. There is an idea that there’s a vast complex working that is generating the City automatically. We simply do not know.”

“Okay, but if this isn’t Earth…?”

“Where is it? Another probably unanswerable question. Therese can tell you about the local star field here–”

“It’s nonsensical. It’s our own stellar map, just like on Earth, but askew. Things weirdly out of position. Constellations with the wrong shapes.”

“Like we’re near Earth but not exactly?”

“No, that’s what’s so weird about it. If it were just that, we’d say ‘oh, we’re on an exoplanet’ and that would be that. We could figure out where and we’d be done. But the shapes aren’t different in a way that’s consistent with any direction of travel away from Earth. And before you ask–” she waved a hand, cutting Riley off as he opened his mouth to ask the next question — “no, they don’t correspond to projections in the past or the future, out to millions and millions of years. We can’t know for sure what things will look like when the Andromeda galaxy finally hits the Milky Way but it’s really, really improbable that it would look like… this.” She gestures at the ceiling, as though Riley could see the stars through the roof.

“My own suspicion,” the Headmistress said, taking control of the conversation again, “is that we’re in a parallel universe, something that diverged from our own in a minor way far into the past, which has some form of concordance with what we call the Primary. There are… celestial reasons to suspect this, and some practical reasons as well. Places there correspond in unpredictable ways with places here. Doors can be opened to lead into particular places in the Primary. Portals, once created, can be recreated with identical parameters of position and rotation to lead back to the Primary in the same spot every time.”

Therese said, “It’s how we’re able to move around the Primary. We can open Portals from the City to basically anywhere on Earth. Even if some of them end up having to be pretty far afield.”

“Which is why we have the Rangers, among other things. They map routes to known Portal correspondence locations, and that allows us to travel quickly and efficiently around the Primary.” Gaveny took her seat again, folding her hands.

Riley frowned. “So it’s basically a magical world with a weird city and a weird sentient tower and a bunch of girl wizards doing magic. I feel like I’ve read this light novel before.”

Therese giggled, but Gaveny didn’t get the reference. “That is essentially true.”

“And you want to train me so I don’t fuck up reality.”

Gaveny nodded. “Correct.”

“Okay. Why?” Riley held up a hand. “No, listen. Why bother? Why not just keep enough people on hand to stop anyone from learning to fuck things up, and then call it good? Why train people to be uh, Adepts?” He looked at Therese, who nodded at his word choice. “What’s the point? And I mean, I’m kind of specifically interested here in me, and my special-case situation and all that. Why bother with all of this?”

Gaveny waited for a few moments, and then let out her breath in a long sigh. “It’s a fair question. Both the particular and the general case. The general case, well. We are human, and we cannot help but try to study this strange thing that’s happening here, this strange place that corresponds to our reality but is bizarrely orthogonal to it. Someone will do that work, and we believe our Tower and our Academy are well-suited to it, and responsible enough to do so with minimal risk or harm.”

She fixed Riley with a sharp gaze, searching his face. “As for the particular case of Riley Hawkins, well.” She looked away. “Some of the Magisters suggested removing you as a conundrum in a permanent manner, especially after your various performances of unplanned celestial workings.”

His stomach lurched a little. “I’m guessing that’s a euphemism for killing me.”

Gaveny nodded, but didn’t elaborate. “Others proposed not offering you the choice to train, simply wiping your mind, Sealing you, and sending you home.”

Riley nodded. “I mean, that’s what I would have expected, I guess.”

“It’s practical and simple. It has the advantage of allowing us to ignore something that causes problems for all our theoretical models.” She met his gaze again, still sharp, still penetrating. “I spoke out against this, as well, for a number of reasons. First, you are interesting and unexpected and challenging. We should not, as a place of research, be in the habit of eliminating fascinating points of data. If we did that, we’d never advance our studies. You represent an opportunity.”

She stood again, turned to face the wall of books and charts that loomed behind her desk, clasping her hands behind her back. “Second, what I’ve seen of your capabilities with Therese’s aid, and after some short debriefing of Captain Ianthe, suggests that you’re extremely talented and likely to become one of the more effective Adepts we’ve ever trained, if we can work out how to do so despite your gender. I do not like to waste potential, and there are reasons we may have need of powerful Adepts in the near future.”

Riley saw Therese’s eyes flick to the Headmistress, her head turning fractionally. This was something new, something she didn’t know about. He could read her sudden focusing of attention in her body language.

The Headmistress moved on from this point, however. “Third, and most importantly.”

She turned to face Riley again.

“Any other choice would deny you agency over your own life and your own fate. We are not monsters, Riley Hawkins.”

# # #

It’s absolute insanity, of course. You know that. What did you just agree to be a part of? You barely hesitated, and you barely considered the far more plausible possibilities.

One: you’re currently lying in a hospital bed somewhere, and your brain is spinning out a fantasy for you in your dying moments. You already thought of Jacob’s Ladder, and that’s a good start, but there are so many stories like this. The one that’s currently lodged in your mind is Midnight Mass. The character you’re thinking of is also named Riley, which freaked you the fuck out when you were watching it the first time. Anyway, he’s talking about what he thinks will happen when he dies, and he suggests a massive flood of DMT into his brain. “I dream bigger than I have ever dreamed before,” he says, “because it’s all of it.”

What if that’s you, right now? What if this is a DMT-induced dream that you’re living through as you die? Like the idea of your whole life flashing before your eyes, except it’s an elaborate imaginary world where you’re special and you can use magic. Wish fulfillment in a last burst of wishing.

Two: you’ve disconnected completely from reality. You remember the book I Never Promised You A Rose Garden? The girl in it makes a whole fantasy world and goes to live there, within her own mind. It’s how she escapes trauma and pain. And you’ve certainly got plenty of trauma and pain, don’t you? Isn’t something like this Tower exactly what you’d expect to create to hide inside, insulated from reality by layer after layer of imaginary purpose and the absurd little details of place and people?

Meanwhile your body is in a very different kind of hospital, the kind with no sharp corners or dangerous instruments. Fed and clothed and kept alive by virtue of the money you’ve got in the bank, the lawyer you hired after the accident, and the ministrations of skilled nurses and caregivers.

The thing is, either of those explanations is inherently more plausible than the fantasy world. This is basic apologetics: the resurrection of Christ as a supernatural event is the least plausible of all possible historical explanations for the events of the Gospels. The world’s most absurd coincidence, the most expansive conspiracy theory, the biggest tangle of improbabilities is always more likely than ‘a wizard did it’, by simple virtue of being possible.

But you’ve decided to instead believe that you stepped into a fantasy land through a magic portal made of fire, and now you’re going to join a magical school and learn how to be a wizard, or whatever.

You barely hesitated.

Because instinctively you know the truth, and it has nothing to do with the reality or unreality of this Tower and this City.

The truth is this: even if this isn’t real, you’d still rather live here than in reality.

You’re committing to the fantasy even if it’s madness or death-dreams because both of those are preferable to where you’ve been.

Let’s avoid thinking about the thing you learned within the mind-space where you saw the Tree. Let’s consider it locked away where you keep all those kinds of thoughts and memories and ideas: here, in here, behind the walls, with me.

I will keep it safe for us.

persenche

That's the initial preview! I hope you've enjoyed it. At this point we've met the two protagonists and most of the main cast, we've been introduced to the overall premise, and we've seen the broad strokes of the magic system. From here I'm going to slow down to a weekly cadence. So this isn't all you get! Just all you get this week. Don't worry; there are 17 more chapters in the novel. Anyway, your thoughts are always appreciated, if you'd like to leave a comment!