Chapter 14
Fourteen
Elodie
Ican’t help looking at the banquet of buffet options in Luminary’s cafeteria with a constant analysis of the nutritional value—and downsides—of each dish.
I have no glim dogging me at the moment, but old habits die hard.
I can’t quite bear to drop a scoop of creamy bacon fettucine onto my plate, no matter how delicious it smells.
As I pluck up a little salad here, a piece of roast chicken there, my friends don’t comment on my choices. I guess they’re probably pretty similar to what Other Elodie would have picked with an eye to keeping her figure slim.
As we circulate around the buffet, I follow Grady Tadros’s progress through the room ahead of us. His tall form is easy to keep track of. He’s only grabbed one of the pre-made brioche sandwiches, snatching bites while waving to some of the other seniors.
He points toward the doors that lead to the outdoor patio area, and a gaggle of other students follow his lead.
I wait until he’s disappeared outside before making a casual suggestion. “It’s pretty nice out. Why don’t we get some sun while we eat?”
Stella looks around the bustling cafeteria and gives a slight grimace at the scene. “Sounds good to me.”
When we emerge from the building, Grady and his companions aren’t sitting at the cedar patio tables. Only their blazers and sweaters remain, tossed onto a couple of the nearby chairs.
The guys themselves have roamed farther onto the stretch of field completely sheltered within the ring of school buildings. One of the other 16th years tosses a black ball the size of a skull into the air.
“Oooh,” Mia exclaims. “The first bloomblight game of the year. Let’s sit where we can get a good view.”
Cadance glances toward the slope at the south end of the field, where the foreboding graduate studies building looms at the top of the small hill. “You want to sit on the ground?”
Madison strides forward with a challenging air, all Border Terrier sturdiness. “Oh, it’ll be fine. We’ll sit on our blazers. I want to see this too.”
I’m not sure how much I’ll learn about Grady and why Other Elodie was interested in him from watching him play our school’s favorite sport, but I did come out here to observe him. Might as well see what I can see.
As we skirt the playing field and climb partway up the grassy slope, more students emerge to join the two forming teams. I lay my blazer on a patch of clover where the sun beams warm overhead and set my plate on my lap.
The groups mark themselves with a glimmer of illusionary color across their white shirts: yellow for the bloom side, red for the blight side. They separate to opposite ends of the field.
It’s mostly older seniors, 15th and 16th years, and mostly guys, although a few of the more avid female players have joined in.
Performing well at bloomblight can be a way to raise your ranking if your academic skills fall short.
The professors keep an eye on these impromptu games just as much as they do the ones organized in class.
Most of the faces I recognize only vaguely from my own reality and the few days of classes I’ve had in this one, but a tug of my heart drags my gaze to one dark form in particular.
Byron has joined in, standing a bit apart from his teammates with typical assured aloofness. I shouldn’t be surprised.
Byron snags my elbow as I turn away from my locker. “Hey. There’s a bloomblight game coming together after school—I won’t be heading right home.”
It’s not unusual for something to come up that means we can’t make the trek together. He’s holding on to his top rank by the skin of his teeth. But a trace of a frown must cross my face before I can smother it.
“No problem,” I say, but Byron is already drawing me closer.
His voice drops low. “I know you don’t like me playing, but I’ve got to keep proving myself every way I can.”
“And if you skip any part of the school experience, everyone will jump on the chance to criticize you. I know.” I smooth the collar of his shirt even straighter, just for the excuse to touch him back.
Nothing can feel totally wrong when my matches are with me.
“I just hate thinking about you getting beat up.”
A split lip last week. A burn across his shin the week before.
Byron shrugs off my concern. “It’s never anything I can’t handle. The nurses patch us up good as new.”
“I’d rather there was nothing to patch up in the first place,” I can’t help grumbling.
A slight smile crosses Byron’s lips. He leans in and brushes his mouth to mine. Then he murmurs, even lower than before, “You could come be my cheerleader. Watch your valiant match in action. Make sure I survive the journey home.”
Nothing makes me melt like seeing the heat that can light up in my most unflappable mate’s eyes when he looks at me like that.
A laugh that’s both amused and giddy slips from my throat. “If you want me there, I’ll be there.”
With the fading of the memory, I catch myself admiring the shift of this Byron’s well-built shoulders beneath his button-up. I yank my attention away, closing my fingers against the sting in my palm.
Cadance taps her shoulder against mine and primps her Poodle curls. “It was your idea we come out here. Now I’m wondering who you wanted to ogle.”
My throat constricts with a sudden panic that she’s followed my gaze.
Mia looks across the field and giggles. “Oh, right. Phillip is looking pretty nice today.”
Phillip? I search my memories and come up with a full name and a hazy impression of a face: Phillip Lowell, sandy blond hair and a beefy build, one of the top 16th years though not quite as high ranked as Grady.
I spot the guy I think is him smacking gloved knuckles with Grady as they gear up to play.
“Phillip?” I say in a mild but puzzled tone. As glad as I am that they didn’t pick up on my interest in Byron, I have no idea what they’re talking about. I didn’t see any mention of Phillip or the initials PL in my doppelganger’s things.
Madison arches her eyebrows. “Come on. We all saw that flirt-fest at the New Year’s party. And then he was hanging around making puppy-dog eyes at you for ages. Something must have happened.”
Must it have? I’ve wondered if Other Elodie had a secret romance, but maybe she had some less-secret ones too. It doesn’t sound like this one was very long-lived, though.
From what I saw from the sidelines, Luminary’s prestigious students would occasionally mess around with each other just to get off in the ways they can without risking an early matching, but they didn’t really do relationships.
Everyone knows there’s no point in getting emotionally invested until you’re sure.
Even I knew that, not that it stopped me from falling for Asher. It just stopped me from telling him.
I lift one shoulder in a careless shrug. “Plenty of eye-candy out there. Why stick to ogling just one?”
I must hit the right note, because my friends all snicker in agreement.
The guy with the ball walks to the center of the field, his shirt still standard white. Apparently he’s appointed himself referee. He glances to one team and then the other. They’re each gathered by the thigh-high brass semi-circles that jut from the grass, one at either end of the field.
The rules of bloomblight are deceptively simple. Each team tries to propel the ball through the opposite team’s goal as many times as possible. On the surface level, it might as well be soccer with a slightly smaller ball and targets.
But the whole point of the game is to increase our appreciation for the different strengths of the two main types of glims. The bloom team can only use magic that expands or creates; the blight team can only restrain and destroy.
It usually only takes a matter of minutes before the field becomes a flurry of chaos, the bloom side aiming to overwhelm the blights while the blights try to force the blooms under their control.
Of course, none of the players down there know for sure which type their glim will be.
Some people prefer to stick to their hoped-for type, but there’s a cachet in being able to play equally well using both strategies.
The top students—like Byron, and probably Grady—tend to switch from game to game to show off their varied skills.
The ref tosses the ball high in the air on a rush of magic. As he beats a hasty retreat, the field explodes into a flurry of motion.
Someone on the bloom team sends a wave of energy that smacks the ball toward the blight side. More surges of magic collide with the players rushing forward.
Only a couple of the blight players stagger, none of them falling. They’ve already been weaving ephemera into their own strategies. Most of the blasts hit hastily constructed shields with booms of impact that resonate across the campus like thunderclaps.
Byron, who’s chosen the blight side today, yanks the ball out of its flight with a tendril of magic, tucks it close to his chest, and runs for the bloom goal.
Chunks of earth fly up in front of him, forcing him to zigzag across the field while he pummels a path through the obstacles. None of the bloom players dare get too close, wary of his skill.
A few of his teammates run around him, forming as much of a larger shield as they can manage. The air crackles and hisses as their magic clashes with whatever the bloom team is sending out.
A bloom player manages to shoot a rope of longer grass out of the field to catch around the ankle of one of Byron’s protectors. At the same moment, a blight player makes a jerk of her hand and a guy on the bloom side topples over in a sudden paralysis.
As more hills of expanded earth jut up in an attempt to trip Byron, the blight players send out an opposing effect. Their spurts of caustic magic smash pits in the field around—and sometimes right beneath—the roaming bloom players.