He spent the rest of the day moving sand with his mind, but instead of doing it the way he had the first day, straining to capture each grain, pushing it with all the desperate effort of his brain, today he let himself experiment. He tried a lighter and lighter touch, tried rolling the sand instead of lifting it into the air. Then he tried to move more than one bit of sand at once. He'd done it before, after all. The trick was that he'd thought of it as one thing - a sand cloud - instead of as three hundred individual grains.
Maybe he could do the same thing now, thinking of all the dark grains as one thing.
He tried, pulling with his mind, but there were too many and he lost focus. He gave up on that idea and concentrated on five grains of dark sand. These he was able to move, rolling them together toward the pile.
He slumped back, amazed, feeling he'd done something incredible. He wanted to say something to Aaron, but instead, he kept his mouth shut and practiced his new technique, getting better and better at it, until he was moving twenty grains at a time. He couldn't do better than that, though, no matter how hard he struggled. Aaron and Tamara saw what he was doing, but neither one of them said anything, nor did they try to imitate him.
That night, Call dreamed of sand. He was sitting on a beach, trying to build a castle for a naked mole rat caught in a storm, but the wind kept blowing the sand away as the water grew closer and closer. Finally, frustrated, he stood up and kicked at the castle until it came apart and became a huge monster with enormous sand arms and legs. It chased him down the beach, always about to grab him but never quite close enough, as it shouted at him in Master Rufus's voice, Remember what your father said about magic, boy. It'll cost you everything.
The next day, Master Rufus didn't drop them off and leave as usual. Instead, he sat down in a far corner of the Room of Sand and Boredom, took out a book and a waxed paper packet, and started to read. After about two hours, he unwrapped the packet. It was a ham-and-cheese sandwich on rye bread.
He appeared to be indifferent to Callum's method of moving more than one grain at a time, so Aaron and Tamara started doing it, too. Things moved faster then.
That day, they actually managed to sort all the sand before dinnertime. Master Rufus looked over what they'd done, nodded in satisfaction, and kicked it all back into one big pile again. "Tomorrow, you're going to sort by five gradations of color," he said.
The three of them groaned in unison.
Things went on like that for another week and a half. Outside of class, Tamara and Aaron ignored Call, and Call ignored them right back. But they got better at moving sand - better, more precise, and more able to concentrate on multiple grains at once.
Meanwhile, at meals, they heard about the lessons the other apprentices were receiving, which all sounded more interesting than sand - especially when those lessons backfired. Like when Drew set himself on fire and managed to burn up one of the boats and singe Rafe's hair before he was able to put himself out. Or when Milagros's and Tanaka's students were practicing together and Kai Hale dropped a lizard elemental down the back of Jasper's shirt. (Call thought Kai might deserve a medal.) Or when Gwenda decided she liked one of the mushroom cap pizza things so much that she wanted more of it and inflated the mushroom so large that it pushed everyone - even the Masters - out of the Refectory for several days until its growth could be tamed and they could hack their way back in.
Dinner the night they were able to use the Refectory again was lichen and more pudding - no mushrooms at all, anywhere. The interesting thing about the lichen was that it never tasted the same - sometimes it tasted like steak and sometimes like fish tacos or vegetables with spicy hot sauce, even if it was the same color. The gray pudding that night tasted like butterscotch. When Celia caught Call going back for fourths, she tapped his wrist playfully with her spoon.
"Come on, you should come to the Gallery," she said. "There's great snacks there."
Call glanced up the table at Aaron and Tamara, who shrugged agreement. The three of them were still being stiff and silent with one another, only talking when they had to. Call wondered if they planned to forgive him ever, or if this was it, and it was going to be awkward for the rest of the time he was here.
Call dropped his bowl back on the table, and a few minutes later found himself part of a laughing group of Iron Year students making their way toward the Gallery. Call noticed that as they went, the glittering crystals on the walls made it seem like the corridor was covered in a fine layer of snow.
He wondered if any of these corridors led in the direction of Master Rufus's office. Not a day went by that he didn't think about sneaking in there and using the tornado phone. But until Master Rufus taught them how to control the boats, Call needed another route.
They walked through an unfamiliar part of the tunnels, one that seemed to slope gently upward, with a shortcut over an underground lake. For once, Call didn't mind the extra distance, because this part of the caves had a bunch of cool things to look at - a flowstone formation of white calcite that looked like a frozen waterfall, concretions in the shape of fried eggs, and stalagmites that had turned blue and green from the copper in the rock.
Call, moving slower than the others, was in the back, and Celia dropped back to chat with him. She pointed out things he hadn't seen before, like the holes high up in the rocks where bats and salamanders lived. They passed through a big circular room with two passages leading from it. One had the word Gallery picked out above it in sparkling rock crystal. The other read The Mission Gate.
"What's that?" Call asked.
"It's another way out of the caves," Drew, overhearing, told him. Then he looked weirdly guilty, as if he wasn't supposed to tell.
Maybe Call wasn't the only one who didn't understand the rules of magic school. When he looked closer, he saw Drew looked about as exhausted as Call felt.
"But you can't just leave," Celia added, giving Call a wry look, as if she thought that every time he heard about a new exit, he was going to consider whether or not he could escape that way. "It's only for apprentices on missions."
"Missions?" Call asked, as they followed the others toward the Gallery. He remembered her saying something about them before, when she'd explained why all the apprentices weren't at the Magisterium.
"Errands for Masters. Fighting elementals. Fighting the Chaos-ridden," Celia said. "You know, mage stuff."
Right, Call thought. Pick up some deadly nightshade and kill a wyvern on your way back. No problem. But he didn't want to make Celia mad, since she was pretty much the only person still talking to him, so he kept those thoughts to himself.
The Gallery was huge, with a ceiling at least a hundred feet above them and a lake at one end, stretching off into the distance, with several small islands dotting the surface. A few kids were splashing in the water, which steamed gently. A movie was playing on one crystal wall - Call had seen the movie before, but he was sure what was happening on the screen hadn't actually happened in the version he'd seen.
"I love this part," Tamara said, rushing over to where kids had arranged themselves on rows of oversize, velvety-looking toadstools. Jasper appeared and plunked himself down directly next to her. Aaron looked slightly puzzled but followed anyway.
"You have to try the fizzy drinks," Celia said, pulling Call over to a rocky ledge where an enormous glass beverage dispenser, full of what looked like water, rested beside three stalactites. She picked up a glass, filled it from the twist spout, and stuck it beneath one of the stalactites. A spurt of blue liquid splashed down into the water, and a mini whirlpool appeared inside the glass, spinning the blue liquid and the clear liquid together. Bubbles rose to the top.
"Go on, try it," Celia urged.
Call gave the drink a suspicious look, then took the glass from her and swigged down the liquid.
It felt like crystals of sweet blueberry and caramel and strawberry were bursting inside his mouth.
"This is fantastic," he said when he was done swallowing.
"The green is my favorite," Celia said, grinning around a glass she'd poured for herself. "It tastes like a melted lollipop."
There were piles of other interesting-looking snacks on the ledge - bowls of shiny rocks that were clearly spun out of sugar, pretzels wound into the shapes of alchemical symbols and sparkling with salt, and a bowl of what looked like crispy potato chips at first glance but were darker gold when you looked at them closely. Call tried one. It tasted almost exactly like buttered popcorn.
"Come on," Celia said, grabbing his wrist. "We're missing the movie." She drew him toward the velvety toadstools. Call went a little reluctantly. Things were still fraught with Tamara and Aaron. He thought it might be better to avoid them and explore the Gallery on his own. But no one was paying attention to him anyway; they were all watching the movie being projected on the far wall. Jasper kept leaning over to say things in Tamara's ear that made her giggle, and Aaron was chatting with Kai on his other side. Fortunately, there were enough older kids around to make it easy for Call not to sit too close to the other apprentices in his group without it seeming intentional.