Chapter 30
Gwendolynne
Heloise and I follow Professor Kaur out of the bar once the meeting has finished.
We hadn’t learned much at the Galloping Gytrash, except the names of MLO members who had died—a detail we already knew.
Plus that there is an MLO leader, someone even higher up than Anika Kaur, who is currently officially at large.
It’s all highly classified, apparently, but the missing leader is still on the run.
We trail the dean and her dog, Lenny, for three and a half blocks. They turn into a dingy alleyway before she finally turns around and sighs. “Miss Chapman, Miss Chan, you can come out now. I know you’re there.” Lenny sits on his haunches, his nose raised, sniffing the air.
We emerge from the shadows, chagrined. I thought we’d been pretty stealthy, but my career pivot into a life of petty crime would have to wait, I guess.
“How did you know it was us?” Heloise seems genuinely shocked.
“Come on, ladies.” She gestures to her face. “Legally blind, remember? I’ve learned to recognize people by their auras, not by their appearances. Your glamours don’t work on me.”
We shuffle our feet. The fact that this didn’t occur to us is actually a bit embarrassing.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” The dean puts her hands on her hips. “Are you thinking of joining the MLO?”
“No,” I say quickly. “It’s just…We were…We were…” I’m grasping for an excuse. Professor Kaur knows that I don’t usually go to places like the Galloping Gytrash.
“We were wondering how you are,” Heloise interjects smoothly, obviously the better liar of the two of us. “Professor Pickering said you were too ill to attend the lecture, and we were just…you know…worried.”
Professor Kaur’s face softens, and she gives a tinkling laugh. “Ill? Is that what they’re telling you?” She shakes her head. “Heavens, Thomas is really a vile, sneaky little…” She trails off into a series of vulgar curse words.
“Thomas?” I blurt out. “Do you mean Professor Pickering, the vice dean?”
She grimaces. “The very same. I should have seen it coming. He’s been trying to get my job since he first started.”
“He lied?” Heloise’s eyes are wide, the moonlight glinting off the sclera. To Heli and me, an actual professor lying is so ludicrous it’s unbelievable.
The dean sighs. “Yes, Miss Chapman, he lied. I haven’t been ill. I was formally suspended.”
“Suspended?” I gape at her. “But why?”
Professor Kaur shrugs, then turns slightly to lean her back against the alley wall.
“I’m quite sure it’s got something to do with Magecorp.
He’s been in their pocket for years. They’ve been bidding to provide funding to Seamere for almost a decade, and I’ve blocked it every time.
Thomas would love to get rid of me and let them make him their Seamere puppet. ”
“And they suspended you…why? Because of your involvement with the MLO?”
“They can’t prove anything—not yet, anyway—but they suspect. If I were just a regular member, they probably wouldn’t have a legal case. But if they find out how high up I am—”
“You’re leader of the MLO?” asks Heli slowly.
“Acting leader,” the dean says. “I stepped into this role twenty-one years ago, when the actual leader was forced to go under cover.”
“Who’s the actual leader?” I’m not expecting a straight answer but still feel it’s worth a try.
The professor gives a small, tight smile. “Only a select few people are allowed to know that, Miss Chan. For safety reasons. We’ve kept the secret for decades—we’re not about to give it up now.”
I deflate a little, though truthfully it was a bit delusional to even bother asking. “So, why the MLO? Is it because you’re anti-Magecorp?”
Pen Ferguson’s involvement is one thing, but this?
The fact that our honorable, upstanding dean is involved with the Magical Liberation Organization is seriously spinning me out.
If the media is to be believed, the MLO are a bunch of radicalists.
Degenerates. Terrorists. And to be fair, they have spent the past few decades sowing discord and blowing the living shit out of things.
And now, they’re possibly killing people in their efforts to sabotage Magecorp. How could Professor Kaur align herself with…with that?
Crossing her arms, Professor Kaur purses her lips.
“I’m a scientist, Miss Chan. I’ve devoted my whole career to investigating how magic works, how we can best use it to help as many animals as possible.
” She raises her head, and it strikes me how tired she looks.
How pale and drawn her face is, how deep the lines are between her brows.
“I’m anti anything that prevents magic from getting to those who need it. ”
“Like Magecorp.” I clutch my head, which is starting to hurt.
“Yes,” Professor Kaur says. “You’d be shocked if you knew what really goes on behind the scenes. Linksphere’s slightly better, but not by much.”
I brace myself, gathering courage, not wanting to let the opportunity to quiz Professor Kaur go to waste. “Is it Magecorp, then, that’s behind the surges, Professor?”
“The surges aren’t caused by Magecorp,” she says, but she’s looking cagey.
I raise my chin. My palms are sweating, but I have to ask. “Are they caused by the MLO?”
Professor Kaur stays silent for what feels like a very long time. “If you really want to know what’s happening, Miss Chan,” she says. “I’d suggest you go to the sixteenth floor of the London General Magical Hospital. I think you’ll find it…illuminating.”
Heli straightens her posture. “We will do, Professor. Thank you.”
The dean grabs ahold of Lenny’s harness and turns to leave. But at the last moment, she says one final thing to us over her shoulder.
“Listen—keep your ears to the ground. I’ll send you both notice of the next MLO meeting.
I know you’re both smart young women with your heads screwed on straight.
” She presses her lips together for a moment before adding, “I’m quite sure that once you’re better informed, you’ll both want to attend. ”
Then she strides right past us, exiting the alley.
Security at the hospital is normally tight, but since everyone knows that Heloise is the daughter of the famous Dr. Nora Chapman, they let us walk right in.
In the bathrooms, we re-assume our glamours—not even Heloise would be allowed to enter the top-secret sixteenth floor—and change into the spare pairs of scrubs we’d luckily stashed in our bags after class.
It’s a short ride up in the lift. The doors ding, opening to reveal a stark white corridor lit by garish fluorescent magelights.
Ahead of us is a set of double doors. We try them, but they’re locked.
Fortunately, I still have Harrisford’s resignio spell, since I’d never successfully used it at Magecorp HQ.
After using the spell to illegally unlock the door, we slip inside. The door shuts behind us with a soft click. Reflexively, I try the door handle—it doesn’t budge—and my heart flips in my chest.
With the door locked behind us and no more resignio, we’re stuck here. I guess we’ll just have to make sure we don’t get caught.
We creep forward. Directly ahead of us is an operating theater, visible through a large viewing window, with perhaps a dozen doctors and nurses, all in surgical gowns, operating on a patient.
The room is abnormally bright, even for a theater; all of the surgeons’ faces are lit up by an incandescent glow.
The patient is completely covered with sterile drapes, so I can’t see what part they’re operating on.
But then I’m hit with that feeling again, the same one I had on the top floor of Magecorp: something sirenlike calling to me.
It slithers beneath my skin, at once both invasive and strangely pleasurable.
The Source. The rock that Conall found in his research. I understand now why the room is so bright, why the lights are so dazzlingly intense. Whatever these doctors are doing in the theater, it has something to do with the Source. Is this what Professor Kaur wanted us to see?
The sound of voices sends Heloise and me scurrying behind an enormous bin on wheels that is piled high with discarded drapes. We crouch behind it, watching as two men in suits stroll to the viewing window.
My chest tightens. My heart thumps. I feel like I can’t breathe.
I recognize the taller of the two men. I recognize his shock of gray hair, his pointy nose, his slightly undershot chin.
The man is my familiar’s ex-owner, Mr. Nathaniel Price. But what is the Magecorp CEO doing here?
Inside the theater, the surgeons have finished closing the patient’s wound, and nurses are moving around the surgical table, removing the sterile drapes.
As the person beneath is exposed, I see that the incision is on the back of their neck, right at the base of their skull. I swallow, feeling sick.
If I’m interpreting the scene correctly, it seems the surgeons have just finished implanting a fragment of Source into a human. One look at Heloise’s horrified expression tells me that she’s come to the same conclusion.
Does it mean what I think it means? That we’ve been looking in the wrong place: It isn’t the MLO that have started using humans instead of objects to tether portals. That it’s actually Magecorp doing it?
I don’t have time to mull this over, because already the patient is being transferred to a gurney and wheeled into the recovery room next door. The head doctor pulls down his mask, shucks off his surgical gown and mask, and tosses them into the basket.
“That’s the last of them for today, then?” the doctor asks Nathaniel Price.
“Yes,” Mr. Price says. “We have more tethers, but since the explosion—not enough Source.”
The doctor gives a tired sigh. “You’d better figure out a way to keep this one alive, then. Or else there’s going to be a worldwide magic shortage.”
“You think I don’t know that?” snaps Mr. Price.
Heloise and I shoot each other a glance. There’s been nothing—nothing—in the news about a global shortage.