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“You’re not going to throw me off by telling me the girl I fancy is an awful nerd with a superiority complex,” Laura says. The ghost of that little smile is there, somehow, at the corner of her mouth. “Nice try.”

“Do you know what you face in me?”

“I’ve got a pretty good idea, yeah.”

“Do you really think you’re helping anyone by doing this?” you say earnestly. “Don’t throw your life away, Laura. You must know there’s no chance.”

Laura’s expression darkens. “Now that’s a bit creepy.”

You never really expected to get rid of the threat this way. Still, it seemed a kindness to try. ( A kindness: you approach all such considerations with the enthusiasm and the approximate understanding of a keen amateur anthropologist.) You fall back on what you know: what works, what has always worked, the heart of power.

You strike.

…

( Laura! howls Walden soundlessly, as the night erupts in a gout of flame.)

In the neutrally decorated halls of Universal House, under beloved posters and favourite blankets brought from home, occasionally with surreptitious contraband (technology, vape pens) hidden under the mattress, the children of Chetwood School are asleep. But not for long; at least, not if their dorm windows face the back of the building, because the curtains are cheap fabric, and not always well lined.

You forgot; Walden forgot. Laura is no lifetime scholar, no master-magician. But she is good. She is very, very good.

The pale multilayered Marshal shield glows clearer and brighter than it did last time you saw it, in October. Laura stands beneath it unharmed by your dreadful blast of fire. She has been working hard on academic magic. Few Marshals take the discipline seriously as something they could use. But Laura saw an unstoppable higher demon fall to a single magician’s mastery and thought: What can I get out of this? What can I learn?

She had to fight tooth and nail to have her evening short course counted as prof dev. Like many children you have known, she finds the theoretical underpinnings of magic dull. But an adult who sets out to learn something has a power that children usually lack: the power to see past boredom. Laura also finds the gym pretty dull. She doesn’t let that stop her. When you put the work in, you get the rewards.

So here are the rewards of daily study, daily practice, and twice-weekly lab sessions under the aging but expert eye of a sharp critic:

Laura was already a reasonably powerful practitioner. That power has grown.

She was fast. Now she is faster.

She was sloppy. Not by Marshal standards—in fact, by Marshal standards she was unusually careful—but Walden certainly noticed. If you use more power than you need, you never need to think twice about the result. Laura did not enjoy being forced to slow down in those lab sessions, but she did it. Then she began to see why she was doing it. After that, she retaught herself basic Marshal combat spells, going slower than she did even as a new recruit, watching a mirror, filming herself and watching the videos. After the first month she could see the errors in magical form. By the second month she was starting to correct them. Six months in, she has grown precise; and as precision grew, the speed came back.

She is still not quite as crisp as you are. Six months of practice does not achieve the same effortless unconscious competence as two decades of obsession. But you were expecting to overwhelm her, to take advantage of the holes and the carelessness and the rapid overexpenditure of power you can see in Walden’s memories. Instead you will have to work for this. Laura Kenning is not a match for you—you are already sure of that. But she is a substantial challenge.

The sorcerous battleground is far enough from Scrubs that no one looking out the windows can make out exactly what is happening. The night porter takes the sensible precaution of locking the doors from the inside after the first group of children comes downstairs to report mysterious flashes of light. He telephones the school Marshal barracks first, and then the police.

…

Laura hits you with flashbangs of combat magic, bright lights and loud noises and—a nice trick, this—grenades of dizziness, aimed at your inner ear. This strategy is cheap, in terms of spellpower expended, and it slowed down Old Faithful substantially.

Old Faithful was not human. You are.

You were not such a fool as to discard the living tissue of your new self in favour of an easily mastered rotting death-puppet. You are Sapphire Walden, alive and whole, and this is your body. You instantiate fine dark membranes to protect your eyes from the bright lights. You miniaturise magical shields for your ears, so the booming of displaced air shrinks to a distant drumming thud. The dizziness is harder to manage. You feel vaguely nauseous. But you command the earth under your feet to rise up and hold you steady; and then, because this is your territory, your land, your school, you extend the ripple in the earth outwards and smile meanly as Laura stumbles and falls.

You intend to cut off the localised earthquake before it reaches Scrubs. Mundanity is slower to respond to your will than the infinitely bendable raw magic of the demonic realm, and besides, you are busy. A few aftershocks slip from your attention. The tower of scaffolding at one end of the concrete edifice sways and creaks alarmingly. Because you lived in California for several years, you are distantly aware: 1960s poured concrete foundations are almost certainly not earthquake safe!

( Stop that, snaps Walden, with the frantic impotence of a person well past the limits of their authority. Stop that at once!

Somewhere at the edges of your attention, Lilly Tibbett comes running out of her ground-floor flat in pyjamas and trainers and an old hoodie, tells the night porter, “We’ve got to get them over to the other side of the road,” and slams the flat of her hand into the nearest fire alarm.)

This place is yours. This place is yours! How dare she—

And then Laura is on you, and that sword is a keen line of white fire, an extension of her arm. Here is the other half of unconscious competence. The Phoenix has been making Walden’s panting middle-aged meat sack run laps of the rugby pitches for six months. Laura Kenning has been an active-duty demon hunter for fifteen years. She knows so much more about having a body than you do.

Now she’s trying to get you with a sword and it’s very scary! Fear is a feeling distinct from a demon’s normal threat assessments. Fear makes the body sweat and tremble and try to run away. How is she so fast? How does she move like that? She catches you glancingly across the thigh—so much for that skirt, while your tights, already laddered, are rapidly going to ribbons—and it’s a cut, it bleeds, it hurts . This is your body! You need that blood! And you cannot pause to heal it because the banishments and abjurations engraved in the blade are giving you the world’s worst headache and you will not, you will not, you will not be sent away.

This place is yours. It is alive, and it is powerful, and it is yours. You demand that power. You draw it screaming from the world. The green grass under your feet shrivels and browns, and the browning spreads outwards, a world burned, a world consumed. The birch tree planted in Charlie’s memory abruptly drops all its young green leaves. They are crumbling to dust already as they fall. Oh, but you are mighty, you are mighty! There are burn marks growing around the magical siphons on your left arm, but you ignore them. You have resources. You won’t hurt the children, no, you won’t even hurt the staff, but you can feed on the green and gold loveliness of this place. You can burn it all up and then let anyone try and stop you—

The dead grass sparks. The fires begin in half a dozen places. Fire is your nature. On the far side of Scrubs, half-awake frightened children are being shepherded across the road as fast as the handful of night staff can make them go.

(The ache in your chest is hers, not yours. This is her school. This is her world you are burning. Whatever else Chetwood is, it has always been green and beautiful. It has taken years, decades, in some places centuries of care, to make it look like this.)

Laura has to fall back from the blaze of you. She is shielding again, shielding as hard as she can. Her forehead and cheeks glow scarlet in the heat. Sweat is dripping down her face. She cries out, “Is this what you want?”

“You don’t know what I want!”

“Is this what she’d want?” Laura shouts, voice sounding clear above the bonfire roar. “Do you really think you’re her?”

“Of course I am!” you lie.

(The small irritating inescapable voice at the back of your mind thinks, very clearly, You are burning down my school. Go fuck yourself. )

And then there is a ringing crash through the heart of your world, a shuddering and shattering, a system unravelling. On the other side of the road, in the high room that houses the thaumic engines, Todd has finished carefully unscrewing the fine walnut panelling— They just don’t make it like that anymore, he’d say. He has given the array of polished gears and fine glassware a thoughtful look, noting the strangely flickering glow-lights, those balefire reflections cast from nowhere. He has selected from his toolbox a hefty, reliable hammer.

Smash.

Glass and brass in tinkling disorder across the parquet floor.

You are shuddering. You are reeling. You are very big and complicated and you need big, complicated systems to live in. You just lost a substantial foothold in the world.

( Get her, Laura! Walden imagines shouting. Now! )

And worse—worse—

Those engines were old and ill-conceived and not fit for purpose and stupid, but they were also foundational. Chetwood needed them. This school site has been home to a lot of magic for a long time. It is uniquely vulnerable.

The Great Key around Laura’s neck almost immediately starts to glow white. It does its best. But the protections it anchors were designed half a millennium ago, by less skilled magicians, for a school that was several acres and several hundred people smaller. That school was burdened with mere decades of adolescent wild magic, instead of the centuries-old weight of power now loose on the world. When they decided to go after the thaumic engines, neither Todd nor Laura had the theoretical grounding, the expertise, to perceive what you and Dr Walden understand instantly: The whole bloody site is about to go sideways into the demonic realm.

This isn’t a demonic incursion. This is, technically, the precise opposite of a demonic incursion. The world of demons is not coming here. We are all going there .

Every inch of the school grounds is slipping, slipping, into the hell you came from. Even the marshy rugby pitches are browning now, and the cricket green is past hope, while the fires are spreading up towards the bluebell wood where the sixth formers congregate for traditional rebellion. Every adult, every child. Every classroom and corridor, every memory and hope that a school represents. Even Walden, master-magician though she is, could not stop it now.

( I want, wails something that Walden knows is not herself. I want! I only wanted! And I tried! I learned!

Walden has carried a higher demon with her through the world for more than a decade, the ravenous hunter bound and quiescent. She always assumed the whole thing was her own idea.)

A blast of force. Laura is thrown backwards and lands hard on her side— oof . She instinctively throws her arm up to shield her head from the obvious next move, the incoming deathblow.

Nothing happens. On the other side of this burning ground, you are scrabbling frantically through your pockets for your mobile phone. You never go anywhere without it—you can’t possibly have left it—

No, here it is. With an act of will you sharpen your own canine teeth to vicious points and tear a fresh gouge in your wrist. Blood spurts over your hand and over the several-years-past-its-best Android phone. The prisoned imp, swollen and overfed, balloons up to third-order size, erupting past the boundaries of its prison. Bloody slime, flecked with glass and fragmented electronics, pours disgustingly out of the touchscreen. You scoop up a handful of the imp’s sudden reification and swallow it whole. The body tries to choke and vomit as you force it down.

(Walden is so appalled by this vile sensory experience that the part of her brain which goes Hmm, what interesting spellwork is switched off completely. A shame. This is quite interesting spellwork.)

“What the fuck, ” says Laura. At first she is saying it because she is watching you eat horrible demonical-mechanical blood-and-glass slime. And then it is because she can see the result.

You were holding this spell at arm’s length, pinned through your phone with a useful imp. You had to, because this is something Walden would not do.

Body, mind, institution, machine; these are the systems you inhabit. And a fifth, which is your own creation. A spell that mercilessly exploits someone else to pin yourself into the life you want. It is a cruel and unfair piece of work, but that’s just how the world is. You didn’t make it that way. And you could have used anyone, but you picked a person who—in your opinion—probably deserved it. ( Deserve ; that is a human concept. Quite a difficult one. You have not fully grasped it yet.)

You consume the imp, and the spell it controlled becomes yours again. Under your feet, the old dead array illuminates. It was built in a vain attempt to contain Old Faithful. Repurposing it saved you some time. You were, after all, in a hurry.

“Jesus,” says Laura, as she parses what she is looking at.

…

(Walden sees: two bodies. One is a withered mummy in faded jeans and a band T-shirt. The tousled mop of hair is starting to flake away from the dead scalp. The hands are curled-up claws. Thankfully, she cannot see his face. He is dead, he is dead. He is twenty years dead and never buried. His death binds her here, and so it binds you here. His death is long over, and it has never ended.

But the sad, withered corpse of Charlie Green is not much of a system by itself. The curled-up claw hands are wrapped around another body. It is technically a living body. It has been in full magical stasis for six months, bound by your rapidly adapted array. This could have any number of horrible side effects. Walden doesn’t know. Neither do you. No one has ever done this to a person before.

Mark Daubery’s expensive trainers still have smears of January mud on them. His eyes are open.)

You have braced yourself now, recentred yourself in the world, and you have no attention to spare for anything but the disaster about to befall Chetwood School. There is a distant up-and-down cry of sirens like some other hunter’s cry, but no outsider can reach the crisis now; those police cars and ambulances are not even in the same reality. The handful of magician teachers on site are throwing up protections as fast as they can around the school hall, where four hundred children huddle in growing terror. The Marshal squad cannot spare a moment to come looking for the heart of the trouble, not with hosts of demons smelling blood, smelling weakness, hungry and advancing.

You have to save this place. You chose it. It’s good. It’s precious. It’s yours .

…

(Walden is the most viscerally horrified she has ever been in her life. She can remember now, just vaguely, the way Mark started screaming as the Phoenix went to work on him. He was overconfident. She cannot judge him for that; so was she. She can judge him for quite a lot of other things, but none of them merit this .

What has been done to him is more monstrous by far than anything she has ever seen or heard of a demon doing. Demons are magical predators. They eat to live, they live to eat. Very few of them think. Very few of them plan. Only something like the Phoenix—fascinated with human magic, equipped with Walden’s human brain—could possibly have come up with something this drawn-out, this ugly, this cruel.)

No human magician could do what needs to be done.

Only a monstrous chimera could do what you have done.

Your present self is a complex construction. Now it shudders along its fault lines, hammered by your desperation and her horror.

Just for an instant, you lose control.

“Laura!” cried Walden. “Laura, for God’s sake, now!”

“What—”

Walden thrust her right arm out. Her blouse was the half-transparent one that she had always regretted buying because the fit was off, but the Phoenix’s stupid exercise regime had made it work. Magic blazed under her sleeve. The curling lines of tattooed spells were smudged and fading under her skin, and the sprawling image of the red-gold firebird occupied almost the entire space from mid-bicep down to the tips of her fingers.

Laura stared. “Saffy, is that you?”

Walden said, “Yes, well done, take a house point! Now would you please stop wasting time and chop it off!”

“Your arm ?”

Walden fixed her with the most withering stare she could muster, which was very withering indeed. “We can discuss it later,” she said. “ Now . Laura. Trust me.”

“This is a Marshal sword, not a fucking bone saw —”

“Please,” Walden said, and Laura stopped talking. “Please.”

(And the Marshal acts. Sudden, decisive. The flash of the silver sword. Your other self trembling with adrenaline and terror. Laura goes for the elbow joint, bisecting you rather than striking you away completely; this is probably wiser than trying to hack through the humerus.

Then pain— pain .

The pain of the body is so alien to you.

But Phoenix, you need not dwell here any longer. It has been so long. You settled down into a self-becoming and forgot about change. Now you are loosed, incandescent. You are free.

The bleeding thing you were screams at you, not in the language you both understand, the language of power, but as one thinking and feeling thing speaks to another. She cries in ordinary words, as if you could be human after all: Hold on, you stupid bird! Hold the school!

You do not have to. Nothing binds you here.

A self is a home is a purpose is a life. But above all those, a self is a choice.)