A Maze of Glass, Chapter Seventeen, Pt. 3
They pushed through.
After Jill’s ‘vision’—or ‘incident’—she started presenting symptoms of withdrawal again. So far out from her last binge and even further from her last long-term burn-out, the recurrence seemed impossible. Medically, at least. But sometimes magic looked like that. Sometimes magic looked like sallow-sick pallor and hollowed cheeks, like shivers and quakes and hours of rollercoaster nausea. Jill did her best to fight through her daily labors, anyway.
Three days after the incident and only two before the Confrontation proper, Zoe heard muffled moans and shuffling scrapes from Jill’s room. Creeping out of bed, she padded down the hall to Jill’s door. “Jill?” she asked, knuckles poised to knock but hesitant.
“Zoe?” came the weak reply.
“Are you…are you okay in there?”
“I really need help.”
“May I come in?”
“Yes, please, yes…”
The ward sealing the lock released and Zoe pushed her way into the room. A skeleton splayed the floor by the bed, surrounded by notebooks and hardbacks. It took a moment for Zoe to recognize Jill through the crawling, bone-white skin, the sweat-crusted hair, coarse and thin, angling from her scalp like broken stalks.
Zoe rushed over to her. “What happened?”
“Had to throw up,” Jill rolled her head vaguely. Zoe saw a glistening spew of yellow bile and clear fluid pooled by the bedside table. Seeing it made her notice the sharp, sour stink of it. “And I fell over.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Zo’…”
“Let me help you up.”
“I can’t do this. Look at me. You know I can’t.”
“I know you can.”
“I’m dying!” Jill snapped. “Fuck. Look at me.”
“And I’m here for you.”
“You can’t be. Not all the time.”
“Two days. Please, please, can you do two days?”
“I’m throwing up nothing. It’s over.”
“No.”
“Please,” Jill whispered. “I don’t want to fight. Please just help me get back in bed.”
Zoe cradled her sister, a collection of sharp angles and hardened corners, as best she could. She pursed her lips, nodded. “I can help. I’ll stay up tonight and stitch together some invocations and wards, what little healing magic I know…I can prop you up until it’s over.”
Jill fluttered her eyelids. Blinked. “You’d do that?”
Zoe forced a chuckle through her throat. In her arms, Jill felt like bone and paper. “I’m pretty sure I literally swore to something like that just a week ago.”
“Has it only been a week?” The haze clouding Jill’s gaze suggested legitimate confusion.
Zoe could’ve cried, but she didn’t. She smiled. “Well…nine days. Including the Gateway.”
“Time crawls,” Jill said, joking and not.
Jill groaned like withered steel as Zoe helped her stand. Buttressed, she moaned and creaked her way to the bed. Beneath the blankets she looked even narrower. Curled up, she shivered. Zoe thought she almost heard Jill’s bones clacking together. Still, six minutes later, Jill’s breath steadied and her shaking stopped.
Zoe crept back to her own bedroom to gather her supplies. She began the spellcraft as soon as she returned.
The night stretched with labor. Jill’s condition called for more than basic morning invocations. It called for spells more powerful and longer lasting. Jill needed increased endurance and stamina not for twenty-four hours, but for at least sixty. Jill needed dulled pain receptors not for an intense, hour-long raid but for days of mundane exhaustion. And while Zoe knew a handful of quick-and-dirty combat healing rituals, she didn’t know much about cleansing a person’s blood of toxins or bolstering a naturally-failing organ. Stringing the single spells into a concentrated matrix increased their overall efficiency and decreased the overall strain on Zoe, but that work, too, took time and focus and effort.
All in all, Zoe spent four caffeine-headached, sweat-slick, queasy hours building up magic in Jill’s bedroom. Even as Jill tossed and turned and muttered in her sleep, Zoe’s concern puddled in her exertions on the floor. By the middle of the third hour, her grief over Jill’s situation had transformed into frustration at the complex task she’d taken on. She cursed and snarled over simple mistakes and multiply-repeated incantations. She tipped over a candle and had to start a fifteen-minute spell-phase from the beginning again. She didn’t bother cleaning up the spilled and drying wax.
She stopped funneling her energy into the spellcraft when confusion and dizziness started blanking her mind. She stopped because she repeated the same step of the same spell three times and still couldn’t get it to take. Breathing hard and feeling embarrassingly frail, she pushed herself away from the symbols and glyphs and ashes and bone and miscellany littering the floor. She used a tipped-over stack of books to help her stand back up.
After the day’s labor and the night’s extra credit, she couldn’t think straight. Her mind felt simultaneously chaotic-cluttered and serenity-empty. She felt like crying and screaming and laughing all at once but couldn’t find a reason to do any of it. Remembering why she’d stood up to begin with, she leaned against a wall and closed her eyes.
When she triggered the matrix she almost lost consciousness. Her eyelids fluttered and she collapsed to her knees, but the bang of her joints against the hardwood sent her straight back up, yelping, wide-awake. She cursed, massaging the bones.
At least the thing took.
She hobbled away from the wall and maneuvered the room to the exit. She left her stuff behind. She could pick it up the next morning.
Still snarling in the hallway, she took out a clove, lit it with her Zippo, and took a puff.
Froze. Exhaled.
And realized that she hadn’t put her Zippo in her pocket that morning and that she hadn’t bought a pack of cigarettes in weeks. Dashing the cherry against the wall until the whole black stick broke apart to the filter, Zoe knew it was already too late. She stood for a long time in the dark corridor waiting for everything to collapse. Nothing happened.
At least, not yet.
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