Awakening - The Last Science #1

Chapter 21 - Waking Up - I

  The last thing Alden remembered was the golem's fist connecting with his chest. Everything after that was a hazy, muffled blur. His reality finally snapped back together after who-knew how many hours had passed. Alden found himself looking up at the ceiling of the back room in Boris' shop, laid out on a fold-out bed built into the wall.

  "Hey," someone called out softly. Alden rolled over, feeling pain spiking in his ribs as he did. Hailey was laying on her side in a similar bed across the room. She actually didn't look too bad, but she was mostly covered in a blanket. Her expression said otherwise.

  "Did we win?" Alden asked, trying to lighten the mood.

  Hailey grimaced. "Wasn't us, but yeah, I think someone on our side did. We're still alive, so that means we probably won, right?"

  "Yeah." He looked around the small room. There was a door back into the main bookstore, though he didn't remember a door in that part of the building before. Maybe his memory was too muddled. He might have a concussion for all he knew. The room they lay in was equipped with plenty of medical supplies, and the beds were firm and rigid. With how he felt, he didn't see any need to get up for a while.

  He didn't want to run into any more horrors outside.

  "You okay?" he asked, before realizing that if they were both laid out in makeshift hospital beds, she probably wasn't okay.

  "More or less." Hailey shifted around a bit in her bed and winced. "I got knocked out. Dude was fast."

  "Yeah," Alden sighed. "How did he do that? It wasn't movement magic. It was like he was in fast forward or something."

  "It was something new, that's for sure. I've never seen anything like that." Hailey frowned. "It doesn't really fit any of the seven affinities."

  "There's seven?" Despite everything, Alden was still curious about how magic worked. Rika had instilled in him that it was a consistent, almost mechanical art—in spite of the name.

  "Actually, we—me and Jessica, I mean—we think there's eight. Because of the symbol on the paper."

  "Oh. There wasn't a symbol on the one I read."

  "Huh. Well, it must have been a different page. Anyway, it's like a weird, curved, two-layer star with eight points. Seemed important, and we already knew for sure there were seven, so we figured it's gotta be eight." Hailey screwed up her eyes as she tried to remember them all. "Movement, self-enhancement, mental, knowledge, elemental, nature, and creation. There's one more, and after what we just saw, I'm pretty sure that was it."

  "Something that lets you run across a room instantly like a crazy blur," Alden muttered aloud. "Like in fast-forward... time control? He sped up time for himself?"

  "You've gotta be kidding me," Hailey muttered.

  "What?"

  "That's what I guessed it was. But I was joking." She sighed. "I bet it doesn't let you go back in time though."

  "Well yeah. We'd probably already know if it did. Someone would have used it to go back and prevent a lot of this, probably. Unless we're the first to ever discover it and no one's ever gone back before?"

  "Too complicated for a concussion," Hailey groaned. "New topic, please."

  Alden wanted to dig into it more, but Hailey looked like she was dealing with a heavy migraine. Hailey being one of the few people he'd actually spent any time with in Rallsburg, he decided to try to get to know her better. She was brave, and cool, and way less harsh than Rika. He cast around his skull for a topic, and landed on the first thing he knew they had in common.