Once he finished his chores, Harlan headed to the northern greenhouse.

  He found the device exactly where Re said. It was small enough to fit in one hand, but felt heavy and blocky. Most of it was a round dial—an old-style gauge with a needle and a scale from 0 to 20, like the pressure meters in the Carmille mines. No units. A row of buttons sat at the bottom, the center one big and red. On top, a little protrusion stuck out—either a plug or an antenna.

  “What an antique,” Harlan muttered, turning it over.

  He walked up to the first bed. The tag read 001. The plant looked like a normal head of onion-cabbage. He held the device close to a leaf, pressed the red button, and watched the needle crawl upward.

  It froze at 1.8.

  Harlan wrote it down at once.

  The next plant—something like a fleshy cactus with a bluish glow—came in at 5.5. He worked through all of them, from a low mat of ground cover to thick, predatory flowers. The last ones jumped all the way to 12.1.

  Harlan copied the numbers into his notebook, then looked from one bush to the next.

  *Same size. Even looks similar. Why is one reading twice the other?*

  *I’ll ask Gramps later.*

  When he went downstairs to the lab, he found himself in a corridor packed with doors. The air was stale. Every door looked the same.

  “Re?” he called. “Where are you?”

  One of the doors cracked open.

  “In here.”

  The room beyond clashed with the corridor.

  First—it was enormous.

  *The underground level’s bigger than the house,* Harlan realized.

  Second—the air was fresh, pushed in by ventilation. It was even a little cool.

  Everything inside was arranged with care. Tables lined the walls, covered in instruments Harlan didn’t recognize, test tubes, vials of liquids, stacks of paper, writing tools. A floor-to-ceiling shelf packed with boxes and equipment stood in the farthest, dimmer corner.

  Harlan stared around with his mouth half open. Re took the sheet from his hand, skimmed the numbers, and said only:

  “Hm. Interesting.”

  He slid the paper into a folder.

  Then his eyes dropped to the device in Harlan’s hand.

  “Why the hell did you bring the crystalloglyophmeter down here? So I can spend the evening hunting it all over the house? You take it, you take readings, you put it back. Every time. Why do I need it here?”

  “Crystal… what?”

  “Crystalloglyophmeter. Damn it—who am I explaining this to?” Re waved it off. “Doesn’t matter. Leave it here for now. But tomorrow the device better be back where it belongs.”

  “I thought the basement was one big lab with test tubes,” Harlan started.

  Re cut him off.

  “There is one like that. It’s not where you need to be. And this office isn’t it either. Come on—training room.”

  They stepped back into the corridor. Re locked the door.

  “Wait—how am I supposed to get the device tomorrow?” Harlan asked.

  “Not my problem,” Re said, already walking. “This way.”

  He unlocked another door and motioned Harlan inside.

  This room was the same size as the last—maybe bigger. But unlike the first, it had almost no furniture: a couple of crates near one wall, and three targets at the far end, like a firing range. Bright crystal lighting flooded the ceiling.

  “All right,” Re said. “Soup-maker. What do you know about operating the Field? About magic, that is.”

  “Well…” Harlan hesitated, trying to build an answer from his sparse observations of Thorren and their talks. “Magic is when a person controls nature and objects using the Field generated by crystals inside the planet. It has Backlash—your head can hurt, for example. People study it in academies, but there are self-taught mages too. There aren’t many of them.”

  Re rubbed the right side of his face and cheek, the skin flushing a little. He answered calmly—but his voice sharpened into something bright and serious, nothing like his usual sarcasm.

  “Fine. And how does it work? A magical spirit flies down from the sky and gives you power?”

  “I don’t know,” Harlan admitted, wary. “I thought you were going to tell me.”

  “At least you spared me the unicorns,” Re grimaced, easing back into himself.

  “The what?”

  “An animal from old fairy tales. Doesn’t matter.” Re sighed and looked at Harlan. “So you’re a complete zero, yes?”

  “Uh… yeah. Probably.”

  “All right. A deal’s a deal. We’ll finish quickly.”

  He walked to one of the crates, rummaged, and pulled out a wooden cube. It was about the size of a fist, but each face had pips like a gaming die.

  “Sit,” he said, pointing to the floor, and dropped down onto the cold stone himself.

  Re set the cube between them.

  “Watch closely.”

  The cube rose into the air, spun between them along a complex but smooth path, and settled down almost exactly where it had started. Harlan didn’t blink.

  “Now watch again.”

  The cube lifted again, but this time it moved in sharp, twitchy bursts. Fast, less controlled—like something invisible was shoving it instead of letting it float.

  “Well?” Re adjusted his glasses. “See the difference?”

  “It moved differently,” Harlan said. “The second time it was… less precise.”

  “Good. The trajectories differed because I used two different methods. Two different types of Field manipulation.”

  Re picked up the cube.

  "First time—telekinesis. I'm not pushing it with my hand. I create a distributed flow in the medium that carries the cube and holds it. For that, the brain must calculate air density, pressure vectors, acceleration, and continuously correct the whole structure.”

  Harlan’s breath caught.

  “Second time I manipulated only the air. Lower pressure here, raise it there—an ordinary flow forms. Call it wind. Wind lifted the cube.”

  Re glanced at Harlan and smirked.

  A hard gust slapped Harlan straight in the face—then vanished a second later, as if it had never existed.

  “Hey!” Harlan protested.

  "Hey what? Practical demonstration." Re’s tone turned smug. “He’s taught by the best professor in the world and he still argues.”

  “Best in the world?” Harlan scoffed. “A professor in a hole like this? Professor of Profanity?”

  “I appreciate your confidence and your sharp tongue, but my patience is not infinite.” Re’s voice went steel again. “So shut up and listen.”

  Harlan went quiet immediately.

  “Now. The point. The crystalline Field. Everyone knows Ghentuva is full of crystals—on it and in it. There are more of them closer to the planet’s core. So many they create a secondary field that permeates the entire planet. We’re sitting in it like a bathtub of radiation. Clear?”

  “Yeah. We learned that in school.”

  “Good.” Re leaned forward. “Now the main thing: the mechanics. The Field does not obey directly. It responds to external impulses, and for some reason it resonates especially well with impulses from the human brain. We do not know why. There are countless hypotheses. None proven.”

  “So to ‘cast’ you just… think?”

  “Good question, soup-boy. Answer: yes and no. You can think, *The sky looks nice today.* And what happens?”

  “Uh, nothing?”

  “Exactly. If you want something to happen, you think: *The sky looks nice. Hand me the binoculars.* You need an impulse with direction. Specific instruction. The Field is the same.”

  Re gestured actively, punctuating every word with his hands.

  “It’s like throwing a stone into water. The Field is the water. A wave rises, slides outward, reaches objects at a distance, and affects them. Maybe washes them away, maybe destroys them, maybe transforms them. The Field takes your thought, charges it with energy—there’s plenty of that—and transforms thought into action.”

  He paused. Harlan sat there with his mouth open.

  “But there is a main problem.”

  “What?” Harlan asked.

  “To do something, you must understand how it works. If you don’t know what stone to pick, where to throw it, and at what angle, you won’t get the wave you need. You’ll splash yourself and go home wet.”

  Re drew in a breath. Harlan frowned, thinking.

  Finally Re continued.

  “And the stone-and-wave is a metaphor. Reality is worse. To make a cube spin, you must understand pressure, what a molecule is, and how to pull it from air. Otherwise the Field does not receive a clear instruction. You must see the process down to the atomic level. If you cannot explain it in words, you cannot do it through the Field.”

  “So now you’re saying it’s enough to think about something and… apply physics?”

  “Fifty percent, yes. It’s deep understanding of the natural sciences. Have you never wondered why mages are mostly academics? No brain—no mage. So. Are we done?”

  “Done?”

  “Well… you don’t know a damn thing. What kind of mage are you?” Re declared, peering over his glasses in triumph. “Go wash dishes.”

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  The victory was already in his pocket—until Harlan hit him with another blow.

  “So what’s the problem, then?” Harlan said, as if it were simple. “Study physics? You’re a professor. You can teach that easily.”

  Re went silent and stared at him for a long time.

  “Assuming you have the brain for physics,” he said at last, “that’s only fifty percent. The rest is concentration, psychological stability, imagination…” He started a list, then stopped. “Fine. If you still want to grind my nerves down, I’ll give you a textbook. We’ll talk in a couple of weeks.”

  He stood briskly and put the cube back into the crate.

  “That’s enough for today.”

  ?

  “Which one first…” Harlan stared at the books on the table.

  *Plants and Animals of Ghentuva: An Almanac* lay on one side. On the other: *Physics, Chemistry, and the World for Day-Zero Mages*.

  He decided: *First, I deal with the crocodile.*

  The section on furrodyles wasn’t long—only a few pages.

  “All right. What do we have…” Harlan muttered, repeating key points under his breath. “Warm-blooded and live-bearing, like Re said. Territorial. Mostly solitary, except mating and raising young. Live in the mountains, northern regions of the planet…”

  He turned the page.

  “Now that’s interesting.” Harlan reread the passage. “Ambush predators. Hunt warm-blooded animals and reptiles. Preferred prey—marsupial mountain wolves, snakes, and crintallions. They attack with teeth first, then envenomate by injecting venom through spike-like growths on the tail. Venom is presumed to be injected only at the moment of attack.”

  Someone had penciled a short note in the margin: *Nonsense.* No arrows. No underlining. He knew exactly who wrote it.

  Harlan thought it over.

  *True—when the furrodyle hit us in the Wildlands, it burst out of the brush. But it struck Kel with venom when it was already dying. Why did it come at us at all?*

  His thoughts drifted for a moment.

  *At least Garret and Kel are alive. How’s Garret doing?* He remembered the smell of sour coffee.

  Harlan shook himself and kept reading.

  The lower half of the page offered a bit about habitat ranges, how to tell males from females, and mating season. Harlan wanted more on venom and hunting behavior, but there was nothing worth the ink.

  *Useless,* he thought. *Almost nothing here is new. I’ll come back when I want to read about the plants and animals the old man keeps.*

  He switched to the pompous one: *Physics, Chemistry, and the World for Day-Zero Mages*.

  Day-zero, the author probably meant, in a literary way, *you don’t know a damn thing*.

  If the flora-and-fauna book was dull science, this one was written like an entertaining self-teacher. Harlan remembered Re snorting at it and then adding, “It’ll do for you.”

  *Now I see why.*

  The introduction covered the same idea Re had explained—only Re had shown magic in practice, and he’d explained it far better. Without context, Harlan would’ve understood almost nothing through the flowery phrasing.

  After the introduction came jagged chunks of physics, sometimes chemistry.

  Instead of a consistent foundation, it read like a cookbook.

  One of the first “recipes” described condensing water from air. It went like: *Want to concentrate water from the air? Here’s the formula of air, a molecular structure diagram, proportions, and the process of isolating hydrogen from the gas mixture.*

  Harlan paused over a highlighted passage about making the Field work:

  *To induce Field resonance, visualize the color blue and recall water; then imagine the physical process in the order described above, and concentrate on the target area.*

  He read those lines three times.

  *This is nonsense.*

  He tried anyway.

  Nothing happened.

  He turned the book in his hands and kept reading.

  ?

  About a week later, Harlan finished a second pass through the day-zero book and even let himself daydream.

  *If Gramps explains how to do it in practice, I’ll become a mage. It’s not that hard. Elis will be shocked too.*

  Then another thought slipped in.

  *Would he ever see Elis again?* He still had almost three years left here, and her scientific expeditions couldn’t last forever.

  *Probably shouldn’t have hoped for much from the start… Even if she didn’t treat me like dirt the way most rich people do, Garret was right. We’re from different worlds.*

  To chase the thought away, Harlan opened the book again and reread the section on telekinetic magic.

  Then he went to Re—like he was walking into an exam.

  ?

  He found Re in the lab. The old man muttered to himself at one of the tables and tapped a device with rhythmic impatience.

  “What do you want?” Re grunted.

  “I read the magic textbook.”

  “And?” Re squinted, hissing the words. “You want a medal? I’m busy.”

  “I need your guidance,” Harlan said stubbornly, standing in the doorway like a small but persistent sapling blocking a massive Ghentuvian scroot. “The book says anyone can do it with enough concentration. You promised to teach me.”

  Re slowly pulled his gaze from the table, looked Harlan up and down, and drew his brows together.

  “Oh, damn you…” he muttered. “Fine. Let’s go, since you’re here. Otherwise you’ll keep coming until I die.”

  They returned to the empty training room with the targets. Re dug into a crate and pulled out the same wooden cube.

  “Sit,” he ordered, lowering himself to the floor.

  Harlan sat across from him, trying to look calm, but inside everything hammered with anxious anticipation.

  Re set the cube between them.

  “Listen carefully. I’m not repeating this three times. To shift the cube with telekinesis you need three things. First—a clear picture of the motion, down to the smallest details. Second—the area of application: where exactly you’re applying the effect through the Field. Third—the medium you’re working with: pressure, density, resistance. All of it. Without it you can still move the cube, but it’ll be sloppy. So focus on the process and the point of application.”

  He tapped a finger against the center of the face with one pip.

  “Here, for example. Now—try. Imagine how the electrons and molecular structure change under your influence. Don’t try to lift it. Just push.”

  “Okay,” Harlan said, nodding.

  He stared at the point and imagined pressure. Imagined flow. Imagined the cube sliding along the floor.

  Twenty seconds of silence.

  The cube didn’t move.

  Harlan blinked a few times, exhaled, tried again—more focused, more force. Five seconds. Ten. Thirty. His forehead dampened. He tried to imagine it even more precisely: electron orbits, the distribution of air molecules, the direction of force.

  The cube sat there like it had been nailed down.

  A third try. A fourth. A fifth.

  Re yawned and began picking at a seam on his pants, looking up at the ceiling.

  “Well?” he grumbled. “Satisfied?”

  Harlan exhaled hard. The blood vessels in his eyes swelled from strain.

  “But what am I doing wrong?”

  “Well, for starters,” Re said, dry as dust, “instead of moving the cube you reenacted a dramatic scene from the latrine. I understand it’s a meaningful part of your life since you started to walk again, but bulging your eyes isn’t enough.”

  Harlan flushed even more.

  Re kept going.

  “I told you that understanding the mechanics isn’t sufficient. You also need a connection to the Field—an ability to focus and transmit thought. And the strength of the impulse produced by the brain varies from person to person.” Re spread his hands. “Guess it’s not your destiny. We can end the experiment.”

  He stood, ready to put the cube away.

  “Wait. Let me try one more time.”

  Re smirked, but sat back down without a word.

  Harlan tried again—desperate. The veins at his temples bulged. Blood roared in his ears.

  Nothing.

  Not even a speck of dust.

  Harlan stared at the cube in silence.

  His throat tightened. His chest went hollow and cold.

  “But…” he forced out quietly. “I tried. I did everything the book said. Everything you told me.”

  Re shrugged.

  “Welcome to reality.”

  Harlan dropped his gaze. His fingers curled into a fist on their own. His mouth went dry. Breathing felt heavy.

  He didn’t say anything else.

  He stood and left the room, closing the door softly behind him.

  Re stared at the door for another minute, blinked, frowned.

  “Tch,” he muttered. “Sensitive little damn fool.”