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Chapter 22: Rigged

Chapter 22: Rigged

"MISS STARLING," SOL GREETED HER. "I have set up the room for you already. As it is already dinner time, I will see you later. Train hard." His cloth fluttered in a farewell wave and he floated out the door. She didn't really see the point in an Ethereal going to dinner, since in all the time she'd sat next to him in the cafeteria, she had never seen any of the Ethereal Delegates ever eat - not even a morsel of food went into their mouths. Then again, she didn't know if they had mouths because she could never pinpoint exactly where, though Sol's voice kind of radiated from underneath his cloths. 

Perhaps it was just a formality that the Ethereal Delegates had to fulfill, to be present at mealtimes whether they ate or not in order to prove that they were part of the Delegates. She allowed herself a grin as she moved to the center of the room. Guess I'm not part of that family then.

Taking stock of all the targets stuck on the walls and floor and hanging from the ceiling, she picked up the throwing knife that Sol had left on the floor and could've laughed at how she was so used to this, with all the weapons and the powers and the different creatures that she'd seen. She ran her fingers across the length of the blade and felt nothing from it, unlike the constant buzzing of the air around her. The knife was as dead as Nicholas's cat had been, but unlike him she felt no urge to bring it back to life. 

Lips curling, she sent the knife airborne, flinging it into the center of one of the targets and cutting the almost invisible string that was tied there. Immediately, the contraption that Sol had set up sprang into motion and tens of knives shot at her from every conceivable spot in the room. She’d done things like this before, with the creative machines that Sol always managed to dream up. But not with this many knives. If she got hurt she’d yell at him later.

A flicker of a thought and the air was whirling around her and she could’ve spun with it, surrounded completely by the buzzing, shivering, whooping call of the wind. Her own personal tornado. She’d practiced with it in almost every training session since the one Sol had showed it to her, and she knew that it was a destructive force, capable of shredding wood, shattering rocks and twisting blades into unidentifiable lumps of metal. If she spun it fast enough, that is. Most of the time she collapsed before she could regain enough control to carve her initials in the concrete walls of her training room.

But this time it wasn’t about destroying things, or tearing things into pieces. This time, she “needed the air to protect her”, like Sol had said. He’d explained it to her as if every molecule of air was like a person, with thoughts and feelings. To do this, the air must want to protect you. Air wants to move. If you move it, it will continue to move until there is nothing more that can be done. Air keeps its promises, but it will be done all the way, to the very end. That had only become clear to her after the Ethereal’s fifth consecutive explanation.

If she told her Air magic to clear the oxygen from a certain area, all the oxygen would be gone, whether she had specified that or not. If she didn’t specify the area, all the oxygen from her location could be gone in the blink of an eye. “To be careful is the key, Miss Starling,” Sol had said. “Air guarantees the events and process, but never the consequences. You will not be able to predict that.”

And if she wanted the air to spin, then it would spin, but it would take a whole lot of effort to make it stop because the air around her, in the training room, wanted to “move” as well. It wouldn’t want to stop, especially not if she just told it to. So she let it go faster and faster, till it formed a constantly shifting sphere of wind that surrounded her from all sides. Again, she had to be careful. If she spun too much the wind would peel the skin off her flesh and tear her to pieces and carve into her bones. But her Air magic wasn’t like that of Metal. It was an intuitive thing, like that time Daniel had given her a paperclip. She just had to think; she didn’t have to feel. And because of that she didn’t have to worry about losing control.