He wondered if any of these corridors led in the direction of Master Rufus’s office. Not a day went by that he didn’t think about sneaking in there and using the tornado phone. But until Master Rufus taught them how to control the boats, Call needed another route.
They walked through an unfamiliar part of the tunnels, one that seemed to slope gently upward, with a shortcut over an underground lake. For once, Call didn’t mind the extra distance, because this part of the caves had a bunch of cool things to look at — a flowstone formation of white calcite that looked like a frozen waterfall, concretions in the shape of fried eggs, and stalagmites that had turned blue and green from the copper in the rock.
Call, moving slower than the others, was in the back, and Celia dropped back to chat with him. She pointed out things he hadn’t seen before, like the holes high up in the rocks where bats and salamanders lived. They passed through a big circular room with two passages leading from it. One had the word Gallery picked out above it in sparkling rock crystal. The other read The Mission Gate.
“What’s that?” Call asked.
“It’s another way out of the caves,” Drew, overhearing, told him. Then he looked weirdly guilty, as if he wasn’t supposed to tell.
Maybe Call wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand the rules of magic school. When he looked closer, he saw Drew looked about as exhausted as Call felt.
“But you can’t just leave,” Celia added, giving Call a wry look, as if she thought that every time he heard about a new exit, he was going to consider whether or not he could escape that way. “It’s only for apprentices on missions.”
“Missions?” Call asked, as they followed the others toward the Gallery. He remembered her saying something about them before, when she’d explained why all the apprentices weren’t at the Magisterium.
“Errands for Masters. Fighting elementals. Fighting the Chaos-ridden,” Celia said. “You know, mage stuff.”
Right, Call thought. Pick up some deadly nightshade and kill a wyvern on your way back. No problem. But he didn’t want to make Celia mad, since she was pretty much the only person still talking to him, so he kept those thoughts to himself.
The Gallery was huge, with a ceiling at least a hundred feet above them and a lake at one end, stretching off into the distance, with several small islands dotting the surface. A few kids were splashing in the water, which steamed gently. A movie was playing on one crystal wall — Call had seen the movie before, but he was sure what was happening on the screen hadn’t actually happened in the version he’d seen.
“I love this part,” Tamara said, rushing over to where kids had arranged themselves on rows of oversize, velvety-looking toadstools. Jasper appeared and plunked himself down directly next to her. Aaron looked slightly puzzled but followed anyway.
“You have to try the fizzy drinks,” Celia said, pulling Call over to a rocky ledge where an enormous glass beverage dispenser, full of what looked like water, rested beside three stalactites. She picked up a glass, filled it from the twist spout, and stuck it beneath one of the stalactites. A spurt of blue liquid splashed down into the water, and a mini whirlpool appeared inside the glass, spinning the blue liquid and the clear liquid together. Bubbles rose to the top.
“Go on, try it,” Celia urged.
Call gave the drink a suspicious look, then took the glass from her and swigged down the liquid.
It felt like crystals of sweet blueberry and caramel and strawberry were bursting inside his mouth.
“This is fantastic,” he said when he was done swallowing.
“The green is my favorite,” Celia said, grinning around a glass she’d poured for herself. “It tastes like a melted lollipop.”
There were piles of other interesting-looking snacks on the ledge — bowls of shiny rocks that were clearly spun out of sugar, pretzels wound into the shapes of alchemical symbols and sparkling with salt, and a bowl of what looked like crispy potato chips at first glance but were darker gold when you looked at them closely. Call tried one. It tasted almost exactly like buttered popcorn.
“Come on,” Celia said, grabbing his wrist. “We’re missing the movie.” She drew him toward the velvety toadstools. Call went a little reluctantly. Things were still fraught with Tamara and Aaron. He thought it might be better to avoid them and explore the Gallery on his own. But no one was paying attention to him anyway; they were all watching the movie being projected on the far wall. Jasper kept leaning over to say things in Tamara’s ear that made her giggle, and Aaron was chatting with Kai on his other side. Fortunately, there were enough older kids around to make it easy for Call not to sit too close to the other apprentices in his group without it seeming intentional.
As Call relaxed into his seat, he realized that the movie wasn’t being projected exactly. A solid block of colored air hovered against the rock wall, colors swirling in and out of it impossibly fast, creating the illusion of a screen. “Air magic,” he said, half to himself.
“Alex Strike does the movies.” Celia was hugging her knees, intent on the screen. “You probably know him.”
“Why would I know him?”
“He’s a Bronze Year. One of the best students. He assists Master Rufus sometimes.” There was admiration in her voice.
Call glanced back over his shoulders. In the shadows behind the rows of toadstool cushions was a taller chair. The lanky brown-haired boy who’d brought them sandwiches for the past few days was sitting in it, his eyes intent on the screen in front of him. His fingers were moving back and forth, a little like a puppeteer’s. As he moved them, the shapes on the screen shifted.
That’s really cool, the little, treacherous voice inside Call said. I want to do that. He pushed the voice down. He was leaving as soon as he passed through the First Gate of Magic. He was never going to be a Copper Year or Bronze Year or any other year than this one.
When the movie ended — Call was pretty sure he didn’t remember a scene in Star Wars where Darth Vader made a conga line with Ewoks, but he’d only seen it once — everyone jumped up and clapped. Alex Strike shook his hair back and grinned. When he saw Call looking at him, he nodded.
Everyone soon spread out through the room to play with other fun stuff. It was like an arcade, Call thought, but with no supervision. There was a hot pool of water that bubbled with many colors. Some of the older students, including Tamara’s sister and Alex, were swimming in it, amusing themselves by making little whirlpools dance along the surface of the water. Call stuck his legs in it for a while — it felt good after all the walking he’d been doing — and then joined Drew and Rafe in feeding the tame bats, which would sit on their shoulders while they fed them pieces of fruit. Drew kept giggling as the bats’ soft wings tickled his cheek. Later, Call joined up with Kai and Gwenda to play a weird game involving batting around a ball of blue fire that turned out to be cold when it struck him in the chest. Ice crystals clung to his gray uniform, but he didn’t mind. The Gallery was so much fun that he forgot to worry about Master Rufus, about his father, about bound magic, or even about Aaron and Tamara hating him.
Will it be hard to give this up? he wondered. He imagined being a mage and playing in bubbling springs and conjuring movies out of thin air. He imagined being good at this stuff, one of the Masters, even. But then he thought of his dad sitting at the kitchen table all by himself, worrying over Call, and felt awful.