With that, he smiled and walked away.
Eva stumbled as his hand left her shoulder. She watched him wander down the empty hallway with static in her thoughts.
Only after he had gone, only after she had stood still for several minutes did Eva blink.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
The moment the words left her mouth, an idea came to mind. She couldn’t be sure that it was what Zagan was talking about, but it fit as well as anything.
Eva balled her fists. “Sawyer,” she hissed through gritted teeth.
With a thought, Eva teleported to the women’s ward. She had work to do. Preparations to make.
The minute she woke up from her treatment, Sawyer would wish that he had never heard of Brakket Academy.
Revised Treatment
Juliana Laura Rivas flipped through the news.
It had been months and there was still no sign that anything was amiss around Brakket City.
The purple streaks in the sky had attracted a good amount of attention for the first month. Brakket was fairly isolated from much of the mundane world, but not so much that the sky would go unnoticed. Even had satellites not been able to pick up the anomaly, people in neighboring cities could look out the window and see the sky. It was simply too huge of an effect to contain.
Conspiracy theorists had come out of the woodwork to appear on talk shows. No one could agree on any one cause. Mundane experts were baffled. Some tried to claim that the purple streaks in the sky were caused by light refracting in certain ways in the area. One guy with extremely messy hair appeared numerous times to claim that aliens were behind everything.
Once it had been found out that Brakket Academy was supposedly one of those ‘magical’ academies, people started to get nervous.
Everyone had been expecting a repeat of the Lansing incident. Some catastrophe of city-leveling proportions. Cameras were trained on the city—from a safe distance—day in and day out.
Somehow, one news station had managed to get Dean Turner to do an interview.
“The state of the sky is the result of a failed experiment. The intended effect was to shade the entire sky for a set distance, filtering certain wavelengths. Uses proposed for the intended effect was to use it in certain parts of the world to control light level to crops, helping to feed millions. It could remove harmful radiation. A more controlled version could be used to color the sky for a celebration, taken down the next day.
“Obviously, things went wrong. The streaks of purple are not harmful. We do not currently know if the sky will return to normal on its own, but we are researching ways to remove the effect.”
Roughly the same announcement that Zoe had said was given to the people of Brakket City.
The interviewer had asked a number of other questions. Most dealing with Brakket Academy itself and the use of magic. Dean Turner had dodged some of the questions while others had been answered.
If Juliana didn’t know better, she might have believed the dean.
But she didn’t need to believe it. She just needed Erich and her dad to believe it.
That interview had started up the debate on whether or not magic actually existed or if everything was a cover up for government conspiracies. Even a decade and a half after Lansing, some people still doubted the actual mages conjuring matter from nothing on live television.
After a month of nothing notable happening around Brakket, the media started to get bored. Less and less of the city was shown. News anchors briefly mentioned that nothing had changed before talking about a plane crash on the other side of the world with a gleam in their eye.
“Now they don’t even show Brakket at all. Obviously nothing bad has happened.”
“We’ve had this discussion before, Juli. You’re not going back.”
Juliana flicked the television off with a huff.
“Mom said I could.”
“Your mother–” Juliana’s father cut himself off with a sigh. He pulled off his glasses with one hand and pressed his thumb and middle finger to his eyes. Bringing his fingers together, he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Your mother is a reckless woman. I love her for it, but she often thinks that others can be as reckless as she is.”
“You aren’t as strong as Genoa. You cannot survive what she can survive.”
Juliana’s head whipped to her other side to stare at her brother. “You think I don’t know that? If I was as strong as she is, mom wouldn’t be in the hospital.”
“Juliana–”
“And stop agreeing with each other,” Juliana said, looking between the two men. “It’s
Resetting his glasses on his nose, her father looked down at her. “Your brother and I have had our… disagreements in the past. Especially regarding your mother. That doesn’t stop the both of us from caring about you. We want you to be safe.”
