THEO 1
Hours before my alarm is set to go off for the last day of school, my seventeen-year-old brother shakes me awake.
“Wha?” I mumble, my voice thick with sleep.
“Wake up,” Jamie whispers.
“What’s going on?” I say, only it comes out as “Whas gong?”
“Dress warm. We gotta go.” He leaves my room before I can ask anything else, and the urgency in his voice pushes me out of bed.
I shrug on a hoodie, struggle into a pair of jeans, and creep down the stairs, careful to avoid the creaky step. Jamie’s waiting at the door. I look around for Kai, his companion spirit. She’s usually wrapped around his neck, or hiding somewhere to scare me when I’m least expecting it, but after a while, I realize she really isn’t here, and her absence perks me up a little. It’s been so long since I’ve had one-on-one time with Jamie.
Outside, it’s still so dark that I can see people’s cirth pendants glowing under their shirts. Jamie leads me quietly through the back alleys of Chinatown.
“Where are we going, Jamie?” I say, but Jamie just shushes me and walks faster. I gotta say, as far as quality time with your brother goes, this kind of stinks, and I mean that both literally and figuratively.
“We’re here,” he says finally.
I look up at the neon sign. It says XIE’S MEAT SHOP in English and Mandarin. “Uh. The butcher’s? What’s going on?” I say again.
Jamie ushers me inside and follows behind, waving to Mr. Xie. To my surprise, Mr. Xie just nods at him and waves us past the register and into the back of the shop. Okaaay. I am officially dying of curiosity. Jamie motions for me to follow him into the meat freezer, closes the door behind him, and asks me about …
“Gaming?” I gape at him like a goldfish, my mind struggling to catch up with what he’s just said. Hey, it’s only four in the morning. I’m still about 80 percent asleep.
“Yes,” Jamie says, impatience tingeing his voice. “That computer game you play, War of People or whatever—”
“Warfront Heroes,” I correct him with a sniff. I mean, I love my brother, but honestly, sometimes he’s just hopeless.
“Right, that one. You know how you get quests and you level up—”
“Warfront Heroes isn’t that kind of game.”
“Theo, please listen.” Something in Jamie’s voice stops me short. Jamie’s always been the sort of big brother you can count on to stay calm and solve every crisis, and in our family, there’s always a crisis. But now I catch a tightness in his voice I’ve never heard before, and it jerks me wide awake. Out of habit, I grab hold of my cirth pendant. Despite the freezing room, the metal pendant remains warm, the cirth inside it glowing like molten emerald.
He blows out a little cloud of steamy breath in frustration. “Let’s just say that in this game, you get quests and you level up, and you get bigger and tougher quests—can you stop fidgeting?”
“I’m cold. We’re literally in a freezer,” I say, gesturing at the giant slabs of meat hanging from the ceiling. The room smells of salt and death. Couldn’t he have asked me all this stuff about gaming at home?
“It’s the only place I know where our conversation won’t be heard. Maybe. For all I know, this freezer might be bugged.” His gaze darts around the cramped space, and he suddenly pounces on something. “Got you!”
I look at the wriggling thing caught between Jamie’s thumb and index finger. “A baby cockroach? That’s gross.”
“It’s a bug,” Jamie says, glaring at the cockroach.
Welp. This is it. All the studying has done his head in. “Um. Yeah? Roaches are generally considered to be bugs, yes.”
“No, I mean, it’s a listening bug.”
Okay, now I’m really worried about my brother. “Why would there be a listening bug in here?”
“Because!” Jamie cries. He throws the roach down on the floor and steps on it, cringing at the crunch it makes.
“Let’s go,” I say. “I’m freezing to death.”
“I told you to dress warm before we left.” The raw frustration in his voice reminds me of Ma snapping at me to stop playing computer games, to do my homework, to hold my chopsticks right, and on and on and on. Man, I don’t need to take this from him as well.
“You could’ve told me we’d be going inside a freezer.” My retort loses a bit of its intended bite because my teeth are chattering so much, but I don’t want to have to spend any of my cirth. The least he could do is use some of his to keep us warm. “Cast Frobisher’s Remedy for Frosty Nights on me, Gege.” I only call him Gege—big brother—when I really need his help.
Jamie raises his hands but hesitates. “I need to save all my cirth for r—” His voice cuts off in a pained grunt, and he coughs.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, it’s just the n—” Again, he chokes on his words and starts coughing. He curses. “I’m sorry, Theo, you’ll have to cast the spell yourself. I need to save my cirth for something. Something really, really important.”
Under normal circumstances, i.e., when I’m not freezing to death while surrounded by headless pigs, I would’ve argued. I’m a total cheapskate when it comes to using cirth. Hey, you would be, too, if you get as little as I do. One cirth is the amount of magical energy required to turn a 160-pound man into a frog, and it costs money to buy. Not a lot, but my family ain’t rich, so my allowance is only enough for about thirty units of cirth a month, which is basically nothing. I can’t even remember the last time I had a fully charged pendant.
But I’m too cold to argue. I focus on my pendant until the power inside it glows. A buzz flows down my half-frozen arms, and I recite Frobisher’s incantation. Green light travels to my hands and bursts in a circle around me. My whole body is suddenly blanketed in a toasty glow. I can almost hear the crackle of a merry fireplace and smell the rich scent of hot chocolate. Frobisher’s Remedy for Frosty Nights is an awesome spell, but I can’t even really enjoy its effects, because as soon as I’m no longer dying of cold, I want to smack myself for using any of the cirth I’ve been saving. Well, actually, I want to smack Jamie for making me use my cirth. It’s all supposed to be for ThunderCon. I check my pendant, and yep, I’m down to about thirty units. Great.
Like any other spell that relies on changing the laws of thermodynamics, warmth spells like Frobisher’s Remedy for Frosty Nights cost a heck of a lot of cirth. Most kids at school buy at least a hundred units a month, and some—not gonna name names—have virtually unlimited amounts. I save like nobody’s business; I even write super tiny so I don’t need to buy extra notebooks, and now, thanks to Jamie, I had to spend ten units just to keep my teeth from chattering.
He doesn’t seem to notice the death stare I’m giving him. “Are you warm? Okay. Good.” He takes a deep breath. “Back to computer games. If I get this right, sometimes you get given a quest that’s too hard, and you have to ask people for help. Right?”
Watching Jamie struggle through a conversation about computer games is equal parts funny and mortifying. He’s your typical teen in that he doesn’t give a whit about non-cirth-powered games. He’s more into stuff like Ketzelpod, a sport for meatheads who can afford the cirth to kick around a ball inside a giant floating bubble of water.
“Ask people for help?” I say.
“Like the game masters. The people who make sure all the players are safe and catch anyone who’s cheating. If you get a quest that’s really hard, you wouldn’t try to complete it on your own, right? Promise me you’d go to the game masters?”
“That’s not what game masters do.” I love Jamie to death, but he’s being so weird right now. He’s never been interested in any of the games I play. Why would he suddenly—
A thought strikes me.
Kai. She’s got to be behind this. Jamie’s spirit companion and I don’t get along, which is putting it mildly. Kai spends 90 percent of her time playing elaborate pranks on me. The other 10 percent of the time she spends hissing and snarling at me.
When Jamie woke me this morning and told me we were going out for a walk, just the two of us, I’d scrambled out of bed like an eager puppy. I’ve had so little one-on-one time with Jamie ever since he got Kai five years ago, which is the main reason I can’t stand Kai. I can’t help feeling like she’s stolen my brother away. And now I realize it was all just a mean prank.
“This is one of Kai’s jokes, isn’t it?” I spit out.
Jamie freezes. “What? No!” He takes a notebook from his backpack. “Look, take this, okay? It’s got some notes you may find useful.”
“Useful for what?” I crack it open, but just then, the door slides open, and Mr. Xie stands there.
“You boys still here? Jamie, when you asked me if you can take your little brother to the freezer, I told you, you get five minutes.” He waves his hand and mutters Pupplenot’s No Strings Attached spell. Cirth flows from his pendant and twines around one of the dead pigs. The carcass unhooks itself and zooms to Mr. Xie’s outstretched hand, nearly bashing into me on the way. “Go on, get outta here. This is no place for kids.”
No need to tell me twice.
“Theo, wait!”
Nope.
I stuff the notebook in my jacket pocket and hurry through the crowd haggling for this pound of belly and that cut of shoulder and only pause to breathe once I’m outside.
“Watch out!” a flying cyclist, weighed down by two boulder-sized baskets of fish, shouts in Mandarin. He’s flying too low, headed straight for my head. I can’t believe I just escaped freezing to death only to perish by flying cyclist.
Right before he rams into me, there’s a flash of green, and the cyclist is knocked aside. He lands, arms flailing, in a huge basket of shiitake mushrooms. Fish fly out and splat across the pavement like silver rain. Next moment, he’s up on his feet, shaking his fist at me.
“You’re gonna have to pay for this!” he shouts.
I blink. “Excuse you?”
A hand pats my shoulder, and I turn to see Jamie. I hate to admit it, but phew. He steps between me and the cyclist. “Actually, I was the one who knocked you off your bike.”
Copyright © 2022 by Jesse Q. Sutanto
