“I know!” said Tamara, treading water. “I saw you!”
“Woo!” said Aaron. He punched the surface of the lake, making it spray up. “You rule!”
“Hello, we all rule,” Tamara objected, as Call started swimming in circles, diving down to breathe and coming up again. He splashed water and grinned.
Sometimes magic really was just as awesome as he’d secretly hoped it would be.
That night, they were the only people in the library — Tamara, Call, Aaron, and Jasper, huddled around a table where a light glowed inside a lamp made from the shell of a huge underwater snail. They kept their voices down; sound tended to echo in the big, spiral stone room.
“So the question is whether whoever tried to kill Call at the awards ceremony is someone who’d be at the Magisterium,” said Tamara, shuffling some papers. “I made a list of all the people who attend school here or teach here, as well as Assembly members who can come in and out.”
Jasper leaned forward to look at the list. “You’re not on it,” he said.
“Of course I’m not!” Tamara flushed. “I didn’t try to kill Call.”
“Kimiya’s not on it, either,” said Jasper. “Or Aaron.”
“Because they’re not trying to kill me,” said Call.
“You don’t know that,” said Jasper. “The list should be objective. I should be on it, too.”
“Believe me,” said Tamara. “You are.”
Jasper made a face. “Good.”
“Look, I know poking around when we’re not supposed to is kind of our thing,” Call said, interrupting them. “But maybe this time we don’t try to catch the spy ourselves. Master Rufus says that there’s some kind of plan in place and Alex’s stepmom is here and is supposed to be setting a trap. Maybe we could leave it to them.”
They all stared at Call as though he’d grown a second head. Finally, Aaron spoke. “Did you drink too much pond water today or something? There’s no way you’d be saying that if it was one of us who was in danger.”
“Think about it this way,” Jasper said. “If the same person who released Automotones tried to drop the chandelier on you, then anyone standing next to you is just as likely to get killed as you are. So for my own sake, I want to look into this.”
Call couldn’t argue with logic like that.
“I’ve been thinking,” Tamara said. “We need to get down in the tunnels where the huge elementals are kept. Then maybe we could figure out who had access to Automotones and how they got it. We can use this list and see if any of these people were down there — there’s got to be some record of visitors or of who has clearance.”
“Won’t the mages have already looked into that?” Aaron asked.
Tamara shrugged. “Even if they have, they won’t give us those names, so it’s a place for us to start narrowing our suspect pool.”
“Someone spent their summer rereading all their Nancy Drew mysteries,” Jasper said.
Tamara gave him a toothy grin. “Someone is going to get a punch in their face.”
“Do you have a better idea?” Aaron asked. “Because if not, don’t criticize.”
“How about Call makes himself into bait?” Jasper offered. “I mean, why wait around and do all this legwork when we can make the killer come to us? We just let everyone know Call is going to be somewhere remote and alone and then when the killer shows up to finish him off, we can jump —”
“Hey, wait a minute,” Call said. “That idea is stupid.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to criticize,” Jasper said, grinning with self-satisfaction. “I think there’s no way it could go wrong.”
Tamara shook her head. “Call could get killed!”
“We’d still catch the spy,” Jasper said, then winced after being kicked savagely under the table. “What? Not a lot of plans have that kind of built-in guarantee!”
“Let’s try it Tamara’s way first,” Aaron said. Then, yawning, he stood. “After classes tomorrow, let’s meet here again. We can look through the Magisterium maps and see if we can figure out where the elementals are kept. I’ll take first shift tonight. Tamara, Call, you both get some sleep.”
“See you then, suckers,” Jasper said. He departed the library by taking the steps on the spiral staircase two at a time.
Call wanted to protest that one of them being awake, taking watch, was unnecessary, but no one was going to listen to him anyway. He got up with a sigh and followed Tamara and Aaron back to their rooms.
Halfway there, though, he straightened up with a jolt. “I know who’d be able to get to those elementals,” Call said. “Warren!”
The little lizard was a fire elemental, after all, and while he couldn’t entirely be trusted, he knew the layout of the Magisterium better than probably anyone or anything else. He’d led them through its labyrinthine corridors before — admittedly, bringing them to the attention of a more powerful and sinister elemental — but still, nothing that bad had happened.
And besides, last year they’d saved Warren’s life. Master Rufus had set up a test of Aaron’s chaos magic in which Aaron had been supposed to send the lizard into the void. Call wasn’t sure what happened to things that got sucked into the void, but he was pretty sure they wouldn’t survive. He’d helped Aaron to do some tricky magic so the lizard could escape. As far as Call was concerned, Warren owed them.
“Come on,” he said, then about-faced in the middle of the hall. “This way.”
The longer the spy was around, the longer his friends were going to hover over him like there was something wrong. He hated it. He didn’t want them to be awake when he was asleep. He didn’t want them in danger. If there was something to be done, he wanted to do it now.
“Where are we going?” Tamara protested as they headed back the way they’d come. “Back to the library?”
The corridor split in half. Call veered to the left. He remembered when he’d first come to the Magisterium how he’d thought he’d never learn the tunnels, the maze-like corridors that ran under and through the mountain. But he had, and now the paths through the upper levels of the Magisterium were as familiar to him as the streets of his hometown.