ENDOPLANET

Finding Lay was easy.  Finding Kris was not.  Lay had been dozing beside some foul-smelling brown concoction he was brewing, and it hadn’t taken much more than Chen crashing into the sickbay, wide-eyed and frantic, to jolt him awake.

“I’m on it,” he’d said before Chen could even utter a word, shrugging his lab coat – his lab coat, which filled Chen with concern – on over a fluffy woollen jumper and shuffling into his slippers before practically flying out of the room without even asking Chen where he was supposed to be going.

Chen was unable to do more than gape after the doctor (who he swore was technically still only a third-year medical student, even if he had been intelligent enough to get himself moved up several years).  It took several minutes to get himself back in working order, and by that stage Lay was long gone and Xiumin would blow a fit if Chen showed up without Kris, so he reluctantly headed for the boarding director’s office.

Unusually for Kris, the guy wasn’t there.  The only sign of life was a butterfly Chen was pretty sure didn’t normally appear in winter resting on a smashed clock.  Chen had directed his magical power at the lights, causing them to flicker sharply in case there was anybody’s attention to attract or Kris was hiding under the desk again, but all he seemed to do was scare the butterfly, so he left again.

After a few minutes of aimless wandering, he figured he might as well check the canteen (which was completely empty) and then the boarding director’s small flat, which was located above the student dormitories in the East Wing.

Chen had to avoid several non-mages who wanted to pelt him with snowballs, insisting that he couldn’t respond with magic as it was against school rules and would get him suspended, and ended up skirting around the back of the building.  Two of them followed him and he shot them a glare.  It was obvious from the way that they were nudging each other and very unsubtly palming snowballs that they wanted to provoke him deliberately to get him in trouble.  Chen settled for focussing his magic on the clouds, knitting them together with his mind and sending them into a broiling mass to scare the boys away.  He winced as thunder boomed out overhead, but stopped just short of pulling lightning on them.  Producing thunder always gave him a headache, and even if he didn’t attack the non-mages with lightning, drawing it in front of them would bring down a sh*tstorm of trouble on him that he would be happier avoiding.  Most people were unaware that he could bring on a full storm, not just lightning, and he intended to keep it that way.

There was absolutely no response when Chen knocked on Kris’ front door, so he concluded the man must have left campus, and then trudged back down to the infirmary.  He had to go through the courtyard he’d left Xiumin in to get there, and it was with some relief that he saw the body, Xiumin and Silva were no longer there.  Several sets of footprints led inside and there was a deep depression in the snow where the body had been.

He was barely alerted by a soft laugh before a snowball compressed into ice struck him behind the left ear, momentarily stunning him.  Fighting off brain freeze, Chen turned to see a mixed group of non-mages around his own age.  Two of the girls were hiding behind a boy poised to throw another iceball.

“Sh*t,” gasped a third girl when Chen’s icy glare caught her.  “It’s the lightning boy.”

They vanished so quickly Chen would have thought they hadn’t been there, were it not for the iceball which had dropped from the boy’s grasp, so compacted that it didn’t even splinter on hitting the ground.

Chen scoffed and continued on his way.  Lightning boy indeed.  They used it like some kind of title he was supposed to be proud of, or even like, but it wasn’t hard to hear the fear and derision in their tones.  It had been like that ever since the tree: before his infamous episode of anger in front of the entire school, he’d been one among many – yet another faceless monster among the freaks in the reclusive magical section of school, as far most of the student body was concerned.  Now he was the token boy for hatred because everybody knew his face and everybody had heard of him.  He rarely felt bitter, but he actually missed being invisible.  He missed being able to mingle with the non-mages as though he were one of them, without being shunned or picked on purely because they were worried his perfect control on his magic might slip and he might frazzle them all to a crisp.

Okay, maybe zapping the tree had been a loss of control, but Chen had been very angry and extremely ill at the time, partially brought on by attempting to use his powers when they were on ebb, and the pilot concoction Lay had cooked up to help him stabilise had given the opposite effect.  On the other hand, Chen now knew that his body could sustain several thousand volts without harm and that he was allergic to unicorn hair.  Whether it had been real unicorn hair, and if so, where on earth Lay had got it from, Chen had absolutely no clue.

Smile, Chen told himself.  That iceball could have knocked you out and it didn’t.

By the time he’d got back to the infirmary, Chen’s forced smile had become genuine, the lifting of muscles around his cheekbones triggering mood boosts in his brain.  It was a trick he’d discovered not long after the principal’s wife had brought him to the school.  He’d been about five and all the adults had kept talking about trauma behind their hands, casting meaningful glances in his direction, and Chen had quickly worked out that a bright smile that didn’t look too faked shut them up.  Smiling so much had become a habit, and that habit had evolved into laughter.  It was much harder to fake laughter convincingly, but normally Chen didn’t have to do that.

Lay was busy when Chen opened the door.

“Come back later,” he said without looking up from the burns he was treating on an unconscious student.  “I have, like, another twenty of these stupid second year kids and—”  He lifted his head to shake his hair out of his eyes and saw Chen hovering at the doorway, the younger male’s eyes flickering between the pile of second years on the ground and Silva, who occupied one of the many beds and was still out cold.  Literally cold, if her blue cheeks were anything to go by.

Chen swallowed audibly as the smell of burnt flesh hit his nostrils, and Lay abruptly appeared in front of him as he gagged, shoving the foul-smelling concoction Chen had seen earlier under his nose.

“Go give this to Xiumin before you throw up.  He’s next door in the single ward.  Numptie was using his powers on ebb again.”

Chen shied away from the appalling smell, eyes watering.  “Are you sure it’s going to work?”

“No,” admitted Lay.  “I haven’t had many people to test my stabilising