I barely resisted the urge to crumple the papers in my hand, as though destroying them beyond repair might do something to take away the truth behind the words printed on them. Roman and Tyler were downstairs, both incensed by our refusal to tell them what was going on, especially considering Adela was in my room with the rest of the senior Tryhards and Cheri.

“What the fuck do we do?” Marika asked, and it took a lot of my willpower to not shout at her. That was what we were all thinking about, and the fact that silence had reigned for a solid ten minutes before that remarkably brilliant question showed that none of us had the slightest clue where to go from here. 

She looked from me to Jay, confusion turning to anger in a spare few seconds at the unfamiliar sight of the two of us at a complete loss. “They can’t just do shit like this, can they? There’s no way.”

I met Jay’s eyes for a moment, and he shook his head imperceptibly. Normally Jay and I were nearly telepathic when it came to interpreting silent signals, but as on edge as I was, I wasn’t certain what he was trying to convey. Was he answering Marika’s question? No, they couldn’t do things like this? I was pretty sure this was exactly the type of thing the Cabals could get away with, and it would hardly require any effort. Was he trying to tell me not to answer her, or not to answer her the way he knew I wanted to?

I glanced at Cheri, but she hadn’t said a word since I got back. She was sitting on the futon, legs drawn up to her chest with her arms wrapped around her knees. No help coming from the local wizard element, then.

“I had a talk with Heinrich, while I was distracting him,” I said, dropping the stack of papers back onto the desk as I began to pace. “He told me about the Familiar pact, about what it meant for the integration efforts, and he hinted at what the exchange program’s real goals were. I just wasn’t expecting...this.”

The sheer amount of loathing that appeared in my voice on that last word surprised me, but after thinking about it, I knew where it was coming from. I’d thought Heinrich had been levelling with me, extending an olive branch in the true spirit of the cultural exchange. My eyes were drawn back to the papers that Marika had stolen from Julia’s room, to a part about two-thirds of the way down the first page.

Dealing with anti-wizard sentiments and skeptics: Emphasize the need for magical control. Utilize list of impactful criminals. If need be, organize dangerous situations and resolve using public displays of magic.

Cheri and I had spared him from needing to go through the last part, but the rest of it was written there, plain as day. And it only got worse, the more I read.

“Do we go to the government?” Adela asked. The information contained in the papers hadn’t affected her much, at least outwardly, though my inability to pick out her emotional reactions was probably as much an artifact of how new she was to the group as it was her natural stoicism. “Wouldn’t that do as much harm as good?”

It was a chilling thought. The Mundane people had a right to know what the Rainbow Nations were up to, but could we really afford to not be allied with the wizards? If Avalon couldn’t pretend they were trying to do this diplomatically, that didn’t mean they would just leave us alone. The alternative was almost too grim to consider.

Cheri’s hands clenched into fists, and she drew her arms tighter around her legs. Everyone else was too distracted to notice, it seemed, but I saw the small motion out of the corner of my eye. In a voice so small I wasn’t sure I’d have heard the words if I wasn’t already paying attention to her, she whispered into the back of her arms.

“That idiot.”

My mouth was halfway open, ready to ask her who she was talking about, when the door to my room rolled open. Two thin blankets, more like sheets, were thrown in through the doorway. They were the lighter kind of cloth, the sort that caught the air and billowed, and they ballooned out to their full area, obscuring my sight and, assumedly, the sight of everyone else in the room. I sighed, but I didn’t really have it in me to do anything about it.

Confused, frenzied whispering caught my ear in the brief moments before the blankets settled to the ground. As they fell, they revealed Tyler and Roman, standing in the room and looking around desperately for the stack of papers that were now in Jay’s hand.

“Spectacular attempt,” Marika said sarcastically. “Really. Truly amazing stuff.”

It spoke to how pissed the two junior members were that none of them balked in the face of the ridicule. Tyler was glaring at me, and Roman was ignoring Marika entirely, struggling to get the papers away from Jay, who was holding them up out of his reach.

“This...isn’t...fair…” Roman said, grunting the words in between wild grabs.

“Why are you doing this?” Tyler asked, the hurt palpable in his words. “I thought we were a team. A family.”

“This has gone far beyond what we originally planned,” Jay said. “We don’t want you two to get involved.”

“Um, I’ve been involved,” Tyler said, and I could hear the wavering in his voice that would eventually become tears if he didn’t calm down. “I’ve been just as involved as any of you, Cheri is just as much my friend as yours, how do you have the right to-”

“They lied, Tyler.”

Every head in the room turned to me.

“Avalon,” I continued. “They lied about everything. The exchange, the integration effort, the peace. They were never looking to do this diplomatically, or at least they never really cared if it happened that way.”

Tyler looked confused. “But...what about Julia? And Augustus?”

“Julia,” I started, my voice dripping with scorn, “has been acting according to the plan this entire time.” I waved one hand dismissively at Jay. “You may as well let them read it. If they’re willing to pull something like that to get at those papers, we probably wouldn’t keep them secret for very long without destroying them.”

Roman took the sheaf of papers and began reading. I kept talking, to make sure we didn’t have to wait for Tyler to repeat the process.

“Each cell was sent out with the same basic structure. One exemplar, someone with a very agreeable public appearance, both physically and magically, to show off the best of what wizards are capable of without being threatening.”

That would be Heinrich: outwardly kind, helpful, and accepting, with a magic that was both visibly spectacular and not so outlandish it would make people uncomfortable. From what I’d read, his only purpose in being here was to act as a “good guy”, someone that the Mundanes could feel

comfortable turning to when the unsavory elements of the cell inevitably made them feel powerless.

“One nemesis, someone with a violent, but approachable magic to draw animosity away from the rest of the cell. They use a metric called a carnage index to determine whether or not a certain magic is too frightening or not.”

Augustus. A person so basically thuggish that I remember thinking it odd that he could actually have functioned in any society, much less one as supposedly advanced as Avalon’s. This made it much clearer. I remembered my talk with Heinrich earlier, when he was telling me about the convicted criminals. Imagining a person behaving like Augustus, only with the threat of one of those magics behind it, and the bully angle would have had a significantly less ignorable nature. With something as simple as pyromancy, something that would stir the age-old, instinctual fear of flame and pain, it was almost believable that most people wouldn’t even associate it with magic. It was just fire.

“One rebel, someone with a magic type that’s largely irrelevant, whose only purpose is to slack off, act estranged from the rest of the group, and give the impression that there are wizards that resent the system and reject the status quo.”

It stung, how easily I’d fallen into every trap that was laid out in the plan we’d discovered. My first thoughts on Xander had been about how comforting it was that there were youths in Avalon just as ready to push back against the system. I could track every step in Roman’s reading, just by seeing the surprise, the shock and the disgust that flashed across his face every time he got to a new paragraph, the next footnote, the diagrams.

“And finally, each group has one mesmer. Someone with a discreet, long-lasting Compulsion magic, intended to capture as many minds as possible to turn them toward supporting the integration movement,” I finished grimly, “with the ultimate goal of gaining control of the leaders of local legislation.”

From what I’d read, it seemed the only thing that wasn’t going according to plan was the way Julia was using her government-approved mindslave army. According to the document, she was supposed to be as subtle as possible, preferably maintaining a background presence, with all of the compelled adoration being directed at the exemplar.

Roman’s hands curled into fists, before he turned and ran from the room.

I watched him go in silence. I didn’t resent him wanting to get away from the situation. If Tyler wasn’t involved, if Jay and Marika weren’t waiting for me to decide on what to do, I’d probably be gone too. Tyler noticed him leaving and looked up for a moment, but his attention was quickly drawn back to the papers.

“It says here,” Tyler started, “that if this...manifesto...is compromised that-”

“All related wizards will face a criminal investigation, and all exposed Mundanes will be retrieved for memory purging,” I finished for him.

“So not only can we not really afford to go to the government,” Jay said, “as soon as they find out that the document is missing, they’ll be sending out the hounds to figure out who took it. And when they do, it’ll be over. The operation, our awareness of the need to fight back, all our memories of what they’ve done and what they intend to do.”

“If they can change people’s memories however they want, what’s stopping them from just killing us?” Tyler said, waxing a touch melodramatic.

“It’s hard to say,” I answered. “Though I’m sure there’s got to be a reason, if they’re not authorizing lethal force in the manifesto. If I had to guess, the fact that they want control over the Mundane governments doesn’t necessarily mean they’re okay with leaving a swath of...dead men…”

I trailed off, looking to Jay as his head shot up, the light coming back into his eyes. Matching grins spread across our faces.

"Genius,” he said.

I scoffed, shaking my head. “I don’t know about that, but it’s worth a shot.”

“I’m missing something,” Marika said, frowning. “I’ve decided being left out isn’t any fun.”

Tyler’s look of outrage set Marika and Jay laughing, so it was left to me to explain.

“A dead man’s switch,” I said. “We can use a dead man’s switch to hold our ground here.”

Cheri stirred at that. “Dead man’s…?”

I was glad to see her rejoining the group. My memory of the look in her eyes as she’d fled the altercation with Heinrich had left me worried and, though she still looked somewhat subdued, it was a welcome sight to see her feeling comfortable enough to jump back into the plan.

“It’s a negotiating tactic that stems from what we call mutually assured destruction,” I explained. “Do you have something like that in the Rainbow Nations?”

“I’m not sure I’ve ever heard that term before, no.”

That didn’t surprise me. In a world where there were not inconsiderable odds that the person you were squaring off with could teleport, stop time, control your mind, turn you into a statue, or call a dozen friends who were capable of worse, I couldn’t imagine too many people being willing to put themselves into so desperate a position. Mutually assured destruction was about forcing the hand of greater powers, and the people of the Rainbow Nations probably didn’t make a habit of conceding the greater power.

“It basically involves ensuring some greatly undesirable end will take place if anything bad happens to us. In this case…”

The plan had originally been to scan and copy Julia’s Ledger to all eight of us, to make sure we had the leverage we’d need going forward, but I had a better use for the scanner I’d had Tyler buy.

“Take the scanner home and get this document scanned and uploaded,” I said, my eyes closed as I talked my way through the plan as it formed. I couldn’t afford to wait for things to go south. When the Rainbow Cabals caught wind of what had happened, the shit would hit the fan quickly, and we wouldn’t have time to reposition afterward. We had to get ready now. “Every ten minutes, Jay, Mari, and I will text you. If you don’t get texts from all three of us, every ten minutes, upload those documents to as many places as you can. Post them on forums, social media, text or fax them to every government official or business owner that you can find a number for, and don’t stop until they come for you or we do. Can you do that?”

Tyler looked uncertain, but nodded anyway. I felt bad, putting this on him while knowing he’d accept without considering the consequences. He’d resented having such a small part in the operation, and the part of him that desperately wanted acknowledgement wouldn’t be able to just sit on that feeling.

We loaded Tyler’s backpack with the small scanner and the documents, and sent him on his way. As he left the room, he paused, giving a hesitant glance toward Cheri. It looked like she was about to say something, but in the end she just gave him a small wave. I felt my stomach twist at the hurt I saw flicker across his face, and then he was gone.

I didn’t like what I just saw. Out of all the members of the Tryhard Club, Cheri was closest to Tyler by a longshot. The two had spent the better part of the last week in each other’s company, my brother bringing video games and movies over to keep her entertained during the long periods she spent alone, while the rest of the club was at school. I could understand her not knowing exactly what to say to me, considering how awkward things had gotten during the operation, but her attempting to distance herself from Tyler was a red flag.

“Could you check on Roman on your way out?” I asked Tyler. “He looked pretty upset. Just go see if he needs someone to talk to.”

Tyler nodded once, giving me a look that I’d learned to interpret as “scared, but trying not to show it”.

Once he was gone, I turned to the wizard girl.

“Cheri,” I said, “I wanted to talk about what happened out there.”

She rose from the futon and began to pace, but it wasn’t lost on me that she was facing away from me when she responded.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice small. “When I use my magic too much, in too short a time...it gets like that. It’s not something I can control yet.”

So I hadn’t imagined it. That ominous, overwhelming pressure she’d given off was something she knew about.

“It doesn’t matter, really,” I said, crossing the room and putting a hand on her shoulder. I was surprised to see tears in her eyes when I turned her to face me. “We just need to know more about it, so we can-”

“It does matter, Emily!” Cheri shouted, cutting me off. I’d never seen her so upset before.

“Just tell us, Cheri. We’re on the same side,” I responded, reaching up to grab her other shoulder. She slapped my hand away, shrugging off the one that was already on her, and stepped back.

“I can’t!”

“After all we’ve learned about wizards today,” Marika said, “you really think what you’ve got going on could be-”

“Worse,” Cheri said quietly.

“Was it something you did before coming?” Jay asked. “Are you wanted?”

“Worse,” she whispered.

Something worse than conspiring to enslave a nation? Worse than fleeing from justice as a criminal? The more I thought about it, the more I was certain she was overreacting. Powerful wizard though she might be, there were just some things about being a teenager that I felt were unavoidable. Her problems might be more complex because of her relatively more complex nature, but I refused to believe it was anything the Tryhard Club wouldn’t accept. I mean, this was what we did. We found the parts of ourselves that we hated, that we couldn’t accept, and we burned them away in the heat of the forge. We tempered ourselves and each other, and came out of the fires better people.

“I have to go.”

The words hit me like a punch in the gut.

“Go?” I asked. “Go where?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, but I could see it in her face that she was serious. “But I can’t stay here. Not if you guys are picking a fight with the Cabals.”

I could see the shock in Jay’s face, probably a mirror to my own expression, but Marika’s was nothing but furious. She took loyalty to the Club a lot more seriously than the rest of us.

“You’re just going to run?” she hissed through bared teeth. I put my hand up, to head her off before she could get too heated, but she wasn’t having any of it. “No, fuck that, Emily! She was instrumental in us getting this far, we wouldn’t have had this plan if it weren’t for her, and as soon as

things get a little dicey she’s just going to leave?”

“I’m sorry,” Cheri said, and she truly looked it.

“We treated you like family,” Marika said, the fire in her burning out as quickly as it had flared. She was left looking exhausted, and she turned away from Cheri as she spoke. “You were one of us.”

Cheri picked up her scarf and wound it around her face. The words she spoke were muffled by the cloth, but the pain in them was plain to hear.

“I was never one of you,” she said, and disappeared without sound or light to mark her departure.

Silence hung heavy over the room. My hands curled into fists, and I glared at the empty space she’d left behind like I could somehow transmit my anger to wherever she’d fled. Is that how it was? We were always just some pastime to her, a convenient way to lay low, free food, free

company? I felt dangerously close to the mindset I’d had before meeting Cheri, the one that demonized all wizards, and I no longer had a single anchor to reach out to. 

“So where do we go from here?” Jay asked. “I’m not crazy about what just happened, but it doesn’t really change what needs to happen or what we’re capable of. If Cheri doesn’t want to be one of us, that’s fine, but-”

Jay cut off as an explosion split the air. The room we were in shook with the impact, though there wasn’t any damage to the area we were in.

The four of us who remained exchanged looks, though I was pretty sure none of us had any doubts as to what was happening. Jay, Marika, and I took barely a minute to gather all of the precautions we’d put in place, the fruits of all the planning we’d managed over the last two weeks, before we joined Adela on the ground floor.

Just over the large barn door that had been permanently sealed after the renovations, a jagged, burning hole had been blasted through from the outside. The edges still smouldered, and the debris from the explosion was scattered around the cushion pit. Roman and Tyler were nowhere in sight.

Jay and I opened the side door and walked outside.

Arrayed in front of the Clubhouse, taking up most of the clearing that separated the building from the path into the trees, stood a large crowd of students. I recognized most of them, though there were a few from the freshman and sophomore years that I hadn’t interacted with enough to have memories of. They each had some form of improvised weapon, baseball bats, sections of rebar, planks, or what looked like broken furniture parts. I could just picture the magical command being sent out, tearing them away from their leisure activities, ordering them to come immediately and arrive armed.

Contrary to my expectations, the wizards were in front of their expendable labor. Julia was wearing the same pale yellow sundress she’d been wearing earlier, though she’d since donned a light jacket. She looked inordinately smug, like a cat with a canary, and as we appeared she leaned toward her brother and whispered something to him, which prompted a chuckle and a sneer.

Augustus was still wearing the athletics clothing he’d worn during his one-on-one with Jay, and he was glaring daggers at my friend. Probably putting two and two together. Xander stood on the other side of Julia, his arms crossed across his chest and an expression that was equal parts resigned and angry. He looked like he didn’t want to be here, and the sum of his body language conveyed a pretty simple message.

I warned you.

Julia raised a hand, and the crowd of students parted. I bit down on a horrified gasp as Tyler and Roman walked forward, their expressions slack. As I watched, Roman positioned himself behind my brother, and received a seven-inch hunting knife offered from Julia’s purse. He set the edge of it against Tyler’s bare neck.

Julia offered me a smile, wide and honey-sweet.

“Let’s talk.”