No housefly moves that straight, just like real beetles don’t stab people in the foot and spew radioactive magic.
“Between what?” A girl sitting dead center in the rows of desks cocked her head.
“What?” Cheyenne glanced at the student, but her gaze whipped automatically back to the dark speck on the wall.
“You said there’s a balance. Between what?”
“Being prepared and giving yourself room to breathe.” The halfling squinted at the not-fly and forced herself to look at her students instead. “Which is what we’re about to do right now. Take some room to breathe.”
“Huh?”
I need to grab that thing before it gets back to whoever’s playing fly on the wall, without blowing this “not an actual instructor” act.
“You heard me.” Cheyenne forced herself to smile, eliciting weird looks from her very confused students, and nodded. Time to break out improv skills. “This might surprise you, but I’ve learned a lot from the simple art of meditation.”
The shaved-head girl in the front pushed up in her seat and looked over her shoulder to gauge her classmates’ reactions.
“This isn’t a meditation class.”
“Hey, good for you.” Cheyenne cocked her head. “You get a gold star for that one. I’m serious. Meditation, visualizing stuff. Whatever. Here’s what’s up. Everybody close your eyes. Take a deep breath.” The kid in the second-to-last row with spiked hair and the hemp necklace from Monday frowned so deeply, it looked painful. “Yep, you’re included in the general everybody. I promise I won’t disappear or anything. You can do the exercise, or you can leave the room and find a different ten o’clock class three days a week.”
Rolling his eyes, the student thumped back in his chair and closed his eyes.
Cheyenne immediately looked at the wall, where the dark speck of not-fly hadn’t moved from its landing. “Okay. Since we’ve had such an illuminating conversation about the end of the semester, you guys are gonna meditate on what you want your final in this class to be.”
“But you said—”
“Uh-uh. Eyes closed. We’re in here for an hour and a half. You can spare a few minutes to realign your undergraduate intentions.” I sound like a lunatic. Not the first time.
With another quick glance around the room to make sure every student had jumped aboard her excuse, Cheyenne stared at the spy machine on the wall. “Make it whatever you like. You picked this class for a reason, I hope, so find the thing you really like about Advanced Programming and dive deep. Imagine yourself sitting down, getting ready to write that code or program or stylesheet.” Someone else snorted. “And you’re totally in the zone.”
This needs to be fast.
“Unaware of everything else around you.”
And timed perfectly.
Cheyenne slowly raised her hand over the desk, aiming her finger at the back wall and watching the fly in her peripheral vision. “The only thing that matters is the end result, and it’s gonna be exactly what you want.”
Now.
The heat of her drow magic burst up her spine as she whipped her hand toward the wall on her right. A quick burst of bright purple sparks shot from her fingertip and hit the spy machine dead-center. The thing let out a surprisingly loud screech as its tiny mechanisms sputtered and sparked. Shit.
Before the metal bug fell two inches off the wall, Cheyenne hooked her telekinetic magic around the machine’s energy and tugged it toward her. The round glinting body whizzed across the room as the students started in their chairs, distracted by the snap and crunch from the wall.
The halfling snatched the spy fly from the air and slipped back into human form half a second before her students opened their eyes and searched for the source of the sound.
“What was that?”
Cheyenne widened her eyes and gave them a tight-lipped smile as she slipped the fried machine into her front pocket. “What?”
“Sounded like somebody got shocked.”
“Woah. Check it out.” One guy sitting by the right-hand wall pointed at the quarter-sized char-mark on the wall, where a thin trail of pale smoke wafted toward the ceiling.
“Huh.” Cheyenne pressed her palms on the top of the desk and leaned toward the burnt wall. “Probably some kind of electrical short or something.”
Half the students who had turned to stare at her again looked mortified. The other half wrinkled their noses at the scent of burnt plaster and hot metal and looked dangerously confused.
“Good thing you’re not teaching an electrical engineering class.” The kid who’d pointed out the smoking dent in the wall slid out of his chair, opened his water bottle, and poured a stream of water onto the wall. It hissed briefly, and the smoke disappeared. “I hope the smoke alarm doesn’t go off.”
“We’ll be fine.” Cheyenne looked at the ceiling and brushed her fingers toward it like she was swatting away a fly. The feeling of her magic barreling toward the ceiling with a forceful breeze convinced her she was right. “So. Anybody get anything useful out of that brief, interrupted moment of internal focus?”
The students shifted warily in their seats to face her again, but no one had a thing to share.
“Then we’ll move on. Feel free to try that again on your own time.”
Rushing through the random choices for a topic she hadn’t had the time to plan, Cheyenne nodded and stared at the table. That was close. How the hell does Maleshi keep it together with crap like this?
* * *
Walking out of that classroom and closing the door behind her at 11:31 a.m. made Cheyenne take a deep, relieved breath. I’m glad that’s out of the way. I get to do it all over again on Friday.
She gripped the straps of her backpack and headed down the hall toward the main entrance. When her back pocket vibrated, she almost slipped into her drow form to fight the resurrected
