April 16, 2025: 5:13 AM

Go with Peter to Learn Magic (75%)

“Fine,” Way eventually said. “But I don’t care how long you were stuck in that cage without company; no being weird.”

He levitated something over his shoulder, floating it off the counter. At first she thought it might be a satchel, though the size was wrong. It fit him too well, and obviously they didn’t have anything in the correct size. But then she realized: it was an old lunchbox with a strap, something she or her sister had used in their childhood.

“I got it. You need time. Anyone would.” They slipped out the back door together, then through the backyard. It was quite large, with a steep slope down one side that made much of it useless. A wooden deck near the house held the covered hottub, along with an old grill, and metal storage shed.

“Does this thing work?” Peter nudged the spa with his hoof. “Would be a pretty relaxing way to spend the night.”

She nodded absently. “We store it dry, so we’d need to fill it first. Uses gas for heating—that big tank against the fence? But we use that gas for the oven and stove too. Not sure how much is left in there, but… I doubt we’d be able to get a refill.”

He sighed. “C’est la vie. But this was never going to last for long-term, anyway. Sooner or later, we’ll either get caught, or run out of supplies and have to find the other freaks.”

She led him down a set of steps cut into the hillside, towards the edge of the property. They passed trees, including the treehouse she had once helped construct. What would that kid think of her now, if he was watching from the branches? Would she be big enough to give him a ride?

They came to the back fence, with its rusty padlock. This one was a simple combination, not a key. She flicked her tail towards it, then stepped aside. “Show me some of those powers. Code is 151.”

“Very secure.” The lock glowed, along with his horn. The wheels turned, then it settled into place, and clicked open. He levitated the small gate open, and held one leg out, like some gentleman escorting a classy friend. “After you.”

“I would hope so. I’m the one who knows where I’m going.” She glanced nervously outside, looking up and down the path. It continued along the stream, marked by gravel set into the dirt. Nothing looked different from the many times she’d walked this trail in the past, or suggested others might be up using it.

She led the way, even if that meant being in front of him. Walking on four legs on damp ground meant feeling the strange touch of mud and gravel against what should’ve been her hands, though of course wasn’t.

One day she might adjust to the strange sensitivity of what she expected to be flat blobs of flesh, but not today. It probably served a purpose, considering it let her know how to balance over rough ground, when some patches were strong enough to hold her weight, and others were going to slip. Way wasn’t just going out there to train magic, but walking too.

The sun was up by the time they reached the little waterfall and pond. Peter jumped into the water to swim, which was only now deep enough for them. Way spent a few minutes waiting beside the water, growing impatient with the discomfort of sweaty fur.

“Are you actually gonna teach me something, Peter? Or did you just want to swim?”

He emerged from the pond nearby, shaking the water away from himself like a dog. A few drops sprayed around her. “Just trying to relax. You think it’s easy to break the laws of physics?”

“I… have no idea,” she admitted. “But I don’t think that’s what we’re really doing. NEM10 has to follow the same rules as the rest of our world, even if we don’t know them yet. Same with what you do, floating things around. Calling it magic just makes it intentionally unapproachable—is that what you’re doing? Making it seem more arcane, so we’ll value your knowledge more?”

He didn’t answer for a few seconds, staring directly back into her face. “Ruby said you dropped out of university,” he eventually said. “What caused that travesty, Way? Whatever field you would’ve joined could benefit from your insight.”

She flushed, ears folding involuntarily back. She would not get flustered from a simple compliment. “No, it wouldn’t. I worked in food service. Waiting tables is the limit of my capacity. Now, are you going to teach me or not?”

Peter sat on his haunches in the moss, staring across the water. “Waiting tables is the limit of my capacity,” he repeated, doing his best to imitate her tone. “Now teach me to use my thoughts to move objects.” He raised a hoof to silence her, preemptively. “Find somewhere comfortable, and pick something to look at nearby, something light, with clear edges.”

She groaned, then obeyed. There was no perfectly comfortable position, not with clothing abandoned and the fear of discovery always present at the back of her mind. Any second strangers might stumble up that hill. Would it be worse if they were random tourists, or other semi-locals that Elliot had met on previous family vacations?

But she heard no footsteps then, just the gentle rumble and splatter of drops of the modest waterfall. “Okay, then what?”

He shrugged. “If you came into this expecting a university-level course, that isn’t where we’re going. I figured it by accident, while locked in my isolation cell. Didn’t even leave me a damn bible to read to pass the time, so… kinda figuring this stuff out as I went. Maybe you’ll discover a better way, and outpace everything I did. I’m not the expert, I was just here first.”

He wasn’t sitting that far away. Just out of reach with her legs, if she stretched. She’d chosen that spot deliberately. “You mean this wasn’t what they were studying on that base? I thought they had something that was causing people to change. And maybe someone flew too close to the sun—Zalenka, maybe. Though he wasn’t the first subject, because he wrote about someone else in his notes.”

“Sounds like you know more than I do,” he said, tilting his head to the side. “I’m glad you’re so well-informed. Do you want to practice or not?”

She did. This skill was much too useful to ignore, even if it meant tolerating the one teaching her. Peter didn’t teach with particular confidence—she probably wouldn’t have even believed his lessons, except that he could demonstrate their success right in front of her.

The sun was high overhead, and her stomach had begun to protest before she finally managed to move something intentionally. Not skillfully, or with any particular direction. But she yanked the lunchbox off a nearby rock and over to her, hard enough to rattle its contents around inside.

“That does correspond with previous observations,” he said. “Desire matters more than any other condition. When you opened the gate, now this. It’s the most reliable way to produce results. But if you rely on it, you won’t be able to use your powers reliably. You can’t count on external pressure to drive you.”

He turned, and the lunchbox unzipped itself. Inside wasn’t something out of a farming feed-bag, but a few packages of snacks from their human supplies, still in plastic. He gestured at a bag of nuts, and it floated over to him, splitting open along the seam. “Go on then, take something. But don’t touch it.”

It took her another hour to manage that much, zipping into the air and smacking her in the face. Finally she got frustrated, and tore the package open with her teeth.

The cheesy snack within tasted far worse than she remembered. Way was hungry enough to devour the entire package anyway, then a yogurt package next. “This feels so stupid, Peter. Like that movie about dudes staring at a goat… I’m just waiting for the punchline.”

He circled past her, splashing into the shallow water. “The punchline is that we’re really living it. Thousands or maybe more people are doing it too. Except for them, they don’t have someone else who’s already been through it. Might think they’re haunted or something.”

She groaned, stuffing the empty wrappers back into the lunchbox, then zipped it back up with her teeth. “Saying it like that makes us seem… kinda selfish. There are tons of people changing all over the place—almost every state had infections. None of them know what’s really going on, except maybe us. But we’re not telling.”

Peter levitated the lunchbox back onto his shoulders. “That’s not how it works, Way. You’re not God, you can’t appear to everyone and warn them. There are already real authorities involved, and they’re putting the word out. But we should probably head back. Don’t want your friends to think I kidnapped you.”

They didn’t run into anyone on the trip back—probably not that surprising, considering the dangers. If Way knew there was some infectious disease spreading rapidly through the population, she wouldn’t be out taking random trips either. They kept to the trees, though some portions were visible from the windows of homes along the way. But if anyone noticed their trip, they didn’t show it.

Eventually they made it back. Peter was right, Ruby and Sam were worried about how long she’d been gone. So she assured them nothing bad happened, and promised to warn them if they went to practice again.

She did practice again, every morning for the next week. There was never anything so formal as a schedule, or even a conversation between her and Peter to agree about their departure time. But he was always downstairs in the morning, always prepared for a trip.

Technically it would’ve been safer to find a quiet room in the cabin and do it there. But Way had already spent much of her time since the disaster hiding from discovery. If they had to live like prisoners, they weren’t really living.

Besides, she wasn’t the only one to take trips out of the cabin. Sam did it too, following the water to various ponds and even going with it all the way to the lake one day, returning with several fish he had caught and cooking them in the backyard. He offered to share the spoils, but no one was particularly interested.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this…” Way said that evening, when the bird came inside with a plate of grilled fish, filleted to perfection. Her old self would’ve been there in an instant, mouth watering. Now it only turned her stomach. “I’ll stick to the oats.”

“What about you, Ruby?” He set the plate down at the table, near several pages of notes.

Ruby no longer sat like a human, or remotely looked like one. Only slightly larger size and stretched proportions suggested she had been anything else. But Way knew from sharing her bedroom that there was little of that humanity left. More painfully, she’d also shown no hint of her earlier feelings, either. It was actually over.

Ruby turned up her nose at the plate, nudging it away with her mostly-melted hand. Only three fingers left, fused together with a thick nail on the end of each one. “I’m with Way.”

“More for me.” Sam sauntered past them both, to the other end of the kitchen table. “Guess I’ll put the rest in the freezer. I can turn that wheatberry slush into something almost edible.”

“No one caught you?” Peter asked, from his place across the room. He spent much of his free time in front of the other laptop, next to a wall covered with blank sheets of paper. They’d drawn a rough map of the country there, with approximations for the states, and colors suggesting various borders, “Isolation areas” and colors with few or no reported infections. “You’re hard to miss. And scarier than we are, with that beak and those claws. No one thinks a horse is coming to kill them.”

“Maybe I flew,” Sam taunted, spreading his wings far to either side. Far enough to brush against the walls. “These aren’t just for show.”

“You didn’t,” Way replied, floating her empty bowl past Sam, and tossing it into the sink. “Because if you had, you’d be bragging about it and not the fish. I know you.”

The bird lifted one “hand” from the floor, narrowing his eyes and pointing in her direction. “The discerning Princess Blue has again bested me. But alas, my heart belongs to another—this delicious meal.”

Which he proceeded to rip apart, so energetically that Way excused herself so she wouldn’t have to look. She wasn’t afraid of Sam, he’d never done anything remotely threatening, and only ever helped during their escape. But that didn’t mean she had to watch him tear that poor fish apart.

By the time she was finished in the shower, she found Ruby in the bedroom, gathering up her notebooks and a few items of clothing into a duffel. She looked up as Way emerged from the bathroom, ears folding suddenly back in embarrassment. While she worked, she was on all fours.

“Way. I meant to tell you.”

“Tell me…” She stopped beside the bed, eyeing the duffel. “Not running off into the night, I hope. You hear what Peter said about Denver? They’ll catch you and ship you back, with the other infected.”

Ruby laughed, voice nervous and distant. “Nah. Just downstairs.” She circled around the bed, then hugged Way in the awkward, animal way their strange new bodies permitted, resting her neck on her other side. Ruby was only just equal with her, and getting smaller every hour now. By morning, she’d be shorter by at least a head. “We’re not really—it’s nothing you did. But Sam—he’s…” She separated, then looked away. “We’ve been spending a lot of time together, while you’re with Peter. If it’s okay for you, than it’s fair for me too.”

She lowered her voice, grinning mischievously. “We have to stay sane through this somehow. I’m not judging.”

Way’s mouth fell open. “Ruby—hold up. You think Peter and I are—”

“Sneaking off together for long hours every day,” she interrupted, still whispering. “Come on, Way. I’m not blind. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, either. You’re surviving however you can. From what I’ve been reading, the mental effects of this mutation are more significant than anything previously studied—way deeper than Cordyceps manipulates insects. Gets right into the cortex. Though I wish we weren’t studying it from the inside…”

“That’s not what it is,” Way stammered. “We’re practicing magic. You should come too—have you seen what he can do? Peter uses a keyboard like he still has hands. He can move multiple objects at once, lift stuff as heavy as me! We need to learn that power too!”

Ruby shrugged her head under the duffel, and backed towards the door. “It’s okay, I won’t push it. You can talk to me when you’re ready.” She vanished out the door, leaving Way alone in the enormous master bedroom.

Way had a choice to make.

1. Go for a walk to clear her head. No one should notice her in the dark.

2. Go talk to Peter. How could Ruby think something so stupid?