Chapter 32
Talisa
As I watched anxiously, the twins split up. Smart.
Juno dropped to one knee on the home base platform and pressed her palms flat against the stone.
She began channeling Earth magic into the sigil with focused intensity.
The green light of the sigil brightened, pulsing in time with her heartbeat.
I saw the faint shimmering curtain of a ward spring into existence around the home base.
Mira moved outside the ward-curtain, so close to the slab’s edge that the toes of her boots hung over empty air. Her lips moved in a spell, and the glow of Wood magic gathered around her fingers, green-tinged and alive. Not a combat spell, I thought. Something defensive.
Across the arena, Cresta and Bernardo stood side by side on their home base, watching my sisters as if deciding which attack to use first.
Then Cresta’s hand came up. She cast an Air spell, a pulse of compressed air, aimed not at my sisters but at one of the smaller slabs grinding past the edge of their home base.
Cresta’s aim was perfect. Her target wobbled, listed, and crashed into the twins’ home base.
My hands clenched the wool of my gown over my knees as the platform shuddered violently. Both twins staggered, but Mira’s balance held, though I saw her arms flail with the effort, interrupting the spell she was casting.
Bernardo didn’t hesitate. His spell hit the same slab Cresta had targeted, but where her spell had pushed, his pulled, changing its trajectory so that it collided with another floating slab, which then veered into the twins’ home base at a sharper angle.
The resulting impact sent a spray of stone chips flying. One grazed Mira’s cheek, leaving a thin line of red, but the rest bounced harmlessly off Juno’s ward-curtain.
Mira changed tactics, switching to an Air spell. The platform nearest her—the one that Bernardo and Cresta’s spells had struck—stabilized, its grinding motion slowing.
For the next five minutes, Cresta and Bernardo continued relentlessly testing the twins’ defenses, sending precisely aimed spells into the grinding chaos around my sisters’ platform.
Pride battled with nerves inside me as Mira countered each strike not by matching force with force but through redirection, using the platforms’ own momentum against them.
Meanwhile, Juno held the wards around their home base steady, defeating all of her opponents’ efforts to knock or blow her off the slab.
Her petite body was rigid with concentration beneath her billowing black academic gown.
Even at this distance, I could see sweat glistening on her forehead despite the cold.
They were holding their own against a much more experienced team. I felt a rush of pride in my sisters.
Then Mira decided to go on the offensive against the opposing team. I saw her cast a calculating look at the sea of floating slabs separating her from the opposing team.
Then she mouthed a spell, and let a levitation spell boost her jump over to a neighboring slab.
“Oh, no,” I heard Mavia exclaim. “She shouldn’t have done that!”
Sure enough, in the next few minutes, I saw the tide of the duel turn against my sisters.
Each time Cresta timed an Air spell to widen a gap, each time Bernardo forced a collision that herded the mobile platforms, Juno’s home base became more isolated. The surrounding slabs were being systematically pushed away, creating a widening moat of empty air between the twins.
I saw Juno’s head come up, her eyes tracking the pattern.
Her head turned to Mira, who was now six slabs away from the home base, and currently unleashing a series of Air attacks against Cresta and Bernardo.
Juno’s mouth opened in an “O” of dismay. She shouted something at Mira.
Mira immediately turned and began working her way back toward her home base, leaping from platform to platform like someone crossing a river on stepping stones.
She was casting a levitation spell to carry her across the widest and final gap when Bernardo’s Earth spell hit the platform directly beneath her feet.
Unlike his previous spells, it wasn’t just a pulse this time.
He directed force against the stone slab in a powerful, continuous torrent.
It listed, tilting sharply like a sinking ship with its bow pointed toward the sky.
Mira was forced to interrupt her levitation spell as she flailed wildly for balance.
Then Cresta followed up her teammate’s spell with another blast of air.
Mira’s feet went out from under her. She caught herself on her hands and knees, and immediately began channeling a stabilization spell into the tilting stone, trying to counter Bernardo’s spell with a brute-force counterspell.
The platform slowed its list, but didn’t stop.
I rose to my feet, screaming advice. All around me, the other spectators surged up, drowning out my voice in a cacophony of shouts, derisive hoots, and chants.
As Mira slid inexorably over the slab’s edge, my sister kept fighting both gravity and Bernardo’s spell.
The lower half of her body now dangled over the slab’s broken edge, leaving her terribly vulnerable to being crushed in a collision.
I could see her fingers clawing into the unyielding stone surface as she frantically tried to find a grip and wriggle back up onto the relative safety of the slab’s top.
From the twins’ home base, thirty feet away across a wide gap surrounded by a churning mass of chaotically colliding stone, Juno saw her twin fighting to recover from Bernardo’s attack.
The home base was holding steady. Juno was the anchor. As long as she could maintain her position, she and Mira had a real chance of winning against Cresta and Bernardo.
She knew it. I knew it. Everyone watching this duel probably knew it.
But Juno had never watched Mira struggle without throwing herself into the fight too, and she couldn’t resist the urge to protect her twin.
Driven by that furious, protective courage that had always been both her greatest strength and her most exploitable weakness, Juno cast a levitation spell and flew from the safety of the home base. She made a beeline for the tilting platform where Mira was fighting to hold on.
“Both members of the Green Team have now vacated their home base,” the herald announced. His amplified voice began counting slowly down from ten.
I guessed Cresta and Bernardo had been waiting for exactly this kind of opening.
“NO!” I screamed. “Go back, Juno!”
But my warning was drowned out by three thousand other voices.
Cresta’s next spell was a sustained blast of air, channeled with the focused intensity of someone who had been saving her strength for the right moment.
It hit while Juno was airborne. A powerful gust of wind hit her mid-leap and slammed her sideways into the path of a floating slab.
Juno’s body hit the jagged edge, and folded sideways around it like a length of cloth blown around the blade of a knife.
The roar of voices rising all around me drowned out her scream, but I saw her mouth stretch wide.
Then she was falling, her limp body plummeting toward the arena’s sandy floor.
A safety net spell caught her before she hit the ground. She hung motionless in the air for a moment. I gasped as I saw a floating slab headed straight for her.
To my relief, it hit an invisible barrier that diverted it away from her.
My heart pounding, I saw Juno float gently down to the arena floor, where she lay sprawled on the pale sand, one arm bent beneath her at an angle that made my stomach turn.
The amphitheater fell silent. For one suspended heartbeat, no one moved. No one breathed. Only the grinding crash of the stone platforms continued, mechanical and indifferent.
And the herald’s inevitable countdown: “Six… five… four…”
Then the noise rushed back in—shouts, cries, arena staff calling for healers, for order, for someone to lower the net.
I was on my feet before I knew I had moved. My body was already turning toward the stairs, every instinct I had screaming at me to go to my little sister, to get to her right now, to put my hands on her and find out how badly she was hurt and fix it, fix it, fix it—
“Talisa, no.” Elio’s hand closed around my waist. His grip felt like a steel manacle. “If you go down there, they’ll disqualify your sisters… and us, too. You know the rules.”
“Let. Go.” I tried to wrench free. His fingers only dug in into my hips. “What if she’s dying?” My question came out ragged, torn from somewhere deep in my chest. “Elio, let go of me!”
Instead, he pulled me down. I landed awkwardly, half-sprawled across his lap. Quick as a striking viper, his arms locked around my waist.
“Listen to me.” His amber eyes were fierce, fixed on mine with an intensity that cut through my heart-pounding haze of panic like a knife. “If you’re disqualified, you lose everything we’ve fought for. Besides, the mage-healers are already here. Look.”
He was right. Three mage-healers in academy blues were hurrying across the arena floor toward the place where Juno lay. One of them was already channeling a diagnostic spell, his hands moving in the familiar patterns Mama used.
Mira, who had been frozen in shock when her twin fell, screamed. It sounded raw, primal. Her face twisted into a mask of terror I had never seen on her before and never wanted to see again.
To my horror, she pushed herself free of the tilting slab where she’d been clinging so precariously, and used a levitation spell to float herself down to where Juno lay.
She landed beside her sister and dropped to her knees, her hands already checking Juno’s pulse and skimming over her sister’s body, her mouth forming a spell I couldn’t hear over the roar of the crowd and the blood pounding in my ears.
Cresta and Bernardo peered eagerly across the arena as the infirmary staff reached Juno and Mira.
Both of the fourth-years were grinning in triumph, anticipating their victory. I glared at them, hating them both for the brutal way they’d chosen to win their match.
Elio still gripped me against him.
“Trust the healers,” he said. His voice cracked. “Please, Talisa. Trust them.”
I nodded and watched through a blur of tears as the mage-healers reached Juno and began their work. A pair of assistants emerged from a side entrance, bearing a portable stretcher.
Juno still hadn’t moved.
Looking at Mira’s anguished expression, I was struck by a dreadful thought: is Juno even still alive?