Page 7 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

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Later, hours later, when any window shows the deep dark that only the middle of winter can get, Chloe’s mind races and sleep evades her.

She huffs out a breath at her dark room, at the uncomfortable cot and the pervasive silence. In the cabin they had to abandon, the cabin she was honestly starting to call home, there had always been a creak of branches outside, the whistle of wind, or the purr of the cat wherever she went.

It had been silent in the prison, too.

“Okay,” she whispers to herself, before tapping the same BIC pen and sending it glowing, casting a warm light across the small room. Despite a tugging sense of exhaustion, despite fatigue in her limbs, her brain sparks from thing to thing, from possibility to possibility, like she had just consumed way too much caffeine too late at night.

Still in her pajamas, as declaratively as she can make herself despite being alone in the room, she stands, testing her balance on the balls of her feet.

Still fine. Still normal. Nothing to remark upon.

The floor chilled against her feet, she grabs her research and pads across the room, a foul taste in her mouth. She had eaten a rather bland meal under the watchful eyes of the Necromancers, but that had been hours prior.

The hallway outside her little ‘apartment’ remains the same, a dull pseudo corporate carpet and grey walls, all perfectly unremarkable. Chloe hated it when they first got here and hates it still.

Except…

With the lights off, lit only by the soft glow of some protective runes imbedded into the walls themselves, a tendril of magic trails down the hallway, a lazy, almost meandering sort of creek, wild and untapped.

That wasn’t there before.

Or, rather, Chloe hadn’t been able to see it before.

“Neat,” Chloe whispers to the dead air, and the magic flutters in the movement from her breath.

She follows it, not quite touching it but hovering her hand near it like it’s a heater in a chill room, stepping close to it like a child sticking near a parent in a grocery store.

It floats through the hallway, dipping into doorways before emerging again in front of her, remarkably lifelike. Alette had spoken of seeing more of the basic fabric of magic after she was brought back, but Chloe had thought she had been speaking metaphorically, as spellweavers are known to do.

Instead, this little bit of actual, physical magic, twists along merrily, avoiding the grand mahogany doors of the sterilized ballroom, until it ends through one of the closed doors of one of the many small kitchens in the compound.

It’s one that Gurlien avoids, Chloe knows that, from his somewhat traumatic time in the compound before he got kickedout, so she twists the doorknob, and it gives another small spark against her palm.

A notification spell. One to inform someone of every time the door opens, some sort of inventory.

Chloe had wandered in here many times, never knew that her actions were being recorded.

It’s empty, the lights flickering on with her step, another small spell activating motion sensors. Inside, the strip of magic spools in one corner, like a pet in a dog bed, overwhelmingly content.

“Weird,” she murmurs, though the hairs on the back of her neck prickle at the possibilities.

She can see magic itself now. How much will that help her, how much will it reveal, how much will she be able to discern from it, how much—

“So you got the ‘can’t sleep’ side effect.”

Chloe startles, spinning around, and without making a sound, somehow Alette’s Wight boyfriend is standing there, casting shadows and everything.

“That’s a known thing?” Chloe asks, when it becomes clear he’s just standing there observing her.

“That we know, at least four of the resurrected people go through a period of insomnia,” he replies, and he’s inhumanly still. “We figured you would, Alette and Axel thought someone should stay up for you.”

Hesitant, as if she is a bug under a glass, Chloe grabs a water bottle from the fridge, gingerly sitting on one of the kitchen chairs.

Another small notification spell. Like they had to track how often people sat down.

“Have you just been here the entire time?” Chloe asks, after another long silence.

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