Chapter Thirty-Four

  In the days after the mountain lion attack, time felt elastic. The proof that her time in the game had been worth something awakened her, and she threw herself into experimenting with the spells from Gamemakers Online, but she felt like she was racing against a clock she couldn't see, which made those moments speed up, a blur she struggled to grasp.

  In the times with her mother, they miraculously slowed down. Her mother was trying to give her the only gift she had left, a chance for Alex to return to living, but she wasn't ready to accept that gift, especially after she learned the Transference spell was real.

  But using those spells inside the game and in real life were two completely different things. It was clear the game used the statistics behind her character as well as her steadfast adherence to the finger movements and words to create the effects, because Alex found them orders of magnitude more difficult.

  For one, she was a mage of low faez, which meant her capacity for challenging spells was limited. She could perform the gestures as clean as a concert pianist—her years of gaming had taught her that much—but that only shaved the amount of power required to accomplish the task.

  The simple spells, like the Five Elements, or Cloud Taunt, she could perform regularly and with a consistent effect. As the complexities grew, so did the requirements of the spell.

  In the game, the Transference spell quickly revealed the nodes available on each item as a ghostly picture superimposed on her subject. In real life, the first part, the seeing, was almost as challenging as the transfer.

  Items and people didn't magically reveal themselves as nodes when the spell was cast. First she had to define her target, shape the area of interest with the spell, which wasn't as simple as drawing a line around an object with a pointer. Instead, she had to slowly sprinkle the faez—the raw stuff of magic—over the affected area, creating an elastic covering that could be stretched and tugged.

  The deliberateness of the task was suited to her low magical ability, because she could slowly dole out faez over time, just not provide a massive spike of it for a fantastical effect.

  Alex found the first part reminded her of knitting. The truth of knitting was that there were only two knots, and the second was a reverse of the first. Those two simple knots, bound into mathematical patterns, could create a multitude of shapes. The first part of the Transference spell was much like knitting, which gave her a head start.

  After three days of analyzing household items for parts that could be syphoned off by the spell—the slickness of a cooking pan, or the softness of wool—Alex started on the second part of the spell: manipulating the nodes.

  Like the first, this part proved more difficult than in game, though the practice was similar. In Gamemakers Online, it seemed like any magical effect or ability could be syphoned off and applied to something else, or someone. But as she studied every item in and around the house, she found this wasn't true for real life.

  As she worked, she learned to see the nodes, which were the anchor points that connected that quality to the item. When she compared two items, there were disparities in the number of nodes and the shape of the object that meant they couldn't be transferred.

  In her mind, she imagined it as a net that was wrapped around one item, but to move it to the second, it had to have a similar shape and anchor points. She couldn't move the strength of an iron crowbar into her arm, because they were too dissimilar—the pulling and stretching of the net was too complicated.

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  Similar items could be accomplished. When Alex managed to apply the stiffness of a metal fork into a plastic spork left over from a fast food restaurant, she cried tears of joy. The original fork disintegrated into a slag of goo, but the new spork had the strength of the metal one but still looked plastic.

  Before long, she'd burned through the kitchen, stripping the utensils and cooking pots of their qualities, producing a drinking glass that didn't break when she dropped it, a rolling pin that weighed as much as a barbell, and a spoon so slick she couldn't hold onto it, among other things.

  Next, Alex went outside, tackling the living world with her Transference spell, reassigning the purple from the Frank's lilac bushes to a patch of grass, or taking the faint licorice smell of goldenrod and applying it to a mouse she caught in a Dewdrop Orb.

  When her mother was asleep, which was most of the time, Alex practiced viewing her aura with the spell, trying to understand the nature of the human body. She would have used herself but using a mirror was confusing.

  Alex took note of the nodes on the surface, sketching them in her notebook. When she could, she verified that her body contained the same nodes, though they were sometimes in slightly different areas. She began to understand that the mystical chakras and other bodily forces were just the major nodes associated with the body.

  After her long study, she realized that taking properties from one person and applying them to another would be nearly impossible due to the complexities of the "nets" and number of nodes.

  She delved into the mathematics of topographical transference to help her understand, studying every paper she could find on the internet. It gave her a wider range of transference as the mathematical tools provided shortcuts in certain situations. But it wasn't until the end of April neared that Alex had her big breakthrough.

  She was studying her mother again, notebook and pencil in hand, sketching the faint nodes near her shoulder. Alex let faez soak into the skin. As the raw magic sunk through the flesh, bits of it collected around the collarbone, revealing a node. She kept going, adding more faez, hoping to learn more about that node, but then a second node appeared deeper inside her mother's shoulder.

  This was new for Alex. She'd only been studying the surface nodes and hadn't thought that more existed beneath, but it made sense, considering the human body was a three-dimensional bag of flesh and bones.

  Staring at her mother, whose face was sunken, her mouth open slightly, a little "O," while her eyes fluttered with the vibrations of dreams, Alex started the spell again. She poured faez into her mother's head, letting the raw magic sink deeper than before.

  As the spell worked, the first nodes appeared—six majors on the face alone—but that wasn't what she wanted to see. Despite a background level of exhaustion, Alex kept pouring in faez, desperate to see inside.

  The skull seemed to resist her intrusion at first, but when she remained persistent, it revealed the truths hidden beneath. When she saw the outline of the tumor, Alex almost ended the spell.

  It was the size of a baby's fist, settled against the back of the skull. It was larger than she’d expected, but also smaller, in the idea that something so innocuous could kill her mother.

  Seeing it made her dizzy, but she refocused, not wanting to lose her progress. She let faez trickle into the tumor, hoping that wouldn't hasten its growth in any way. As the first nodes appeared, Alex squeezed her lips tight.

  Healthy growing things had an orderly existence, nodes that seemed logical in their placement. But the tumor was a malignant twisted thing, a warping of nature, with nodes scattered across it haphazardly. Only when she expanded her sight to the brain matter around it did she see how it had burrowed its way into her mother's brain like a parasite.

  The only thing that gave her any relief was that the tumor was a singular mass of cells. It hadn't metastasized yet, spreading to other areas of the body, or she would have seen faint lines leading south. Maybe it never would, because its existence alone was enough to kill her mother.

  With a shaking hand, Alex spent the next hour sketching the tumor in its misshapen glory, including the surrounding brain matter and how it was connected.

  When she was finished, her forehead was covered in sweat. Alex gently set the notebook down and wandered outside in the cool evening with her hands on her head. As soon as she'd seen the nodes on the tumor, a plan had formed in her head. Confirming the connections had only proved that what she wanted to do was possible. There would be some planning, some mathematical sleight of hand, but it was possible. She knew she could do it.

  Alex was going to save her mother.