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This was a stupid idea.
But here it was, in the name of progress: free auditions to Piltover University. Open to all potentials, above and below. The first round was last week, a paper test that Ekko cleared easily. So he was invited to the next step: The second round. A practical.
The Academy didn’t just want scholars, they wanted creatives. People who could change the future. Anyone else could just go to college. This was the Academy. That was the slogan, anyway. Ekko found most of it bullshit. But that didn’t change the fact that this was the most prestigious school for miles.
The Academy was… gorgeous, he guessed was the word for it. It was like the rest of Piltover: huge, gilded, ostentatious. Not everything needed to be white marble and twenty stories like it was doing its best to reach into the heavens, but he supposed tastes differed when you had the money for it. The massive staircase he was standing in front of was somehow more intimidating than any parkour off of roofs down under that he’d ever done. The air certainly tasted cleaner.
He’d asked Benzo if this was a stupid idea. Benzo had shrugged and said Maybe. Maybe not. He wouldn’t have listened even if Benzo told him not to do it. This was a chance to prove himself. This was a chance to get the funding he needed for the projects that the people needed. A way to change the undercity.
Bleeding-heart idealist, he chided himself, hands in his pockets. He was wearing a sharp suit that made Benzo laugh and say that he looked like a bit of a jackass, which he assumed meant he was on the right track for Piltover.
He exhaled sharply. Under his arm he had his project, long and rectangular and wrapped in cloth.
One shot to present.
He headed up the stairs.
People spilled in and out of the place like ants. Everyone had somewhere to be. It was the same in the Lanes, except that people there tended to keep their head down and move fast. Here, groups of people lingered at the corners by the railings, laughing at something or complaining so loudly he could hear the specifics of the breakup they were going through.
He trailed his hand along the golden banister dividing the stairs. It was so unnecessary. He imagined grinding a board down it, and laughed.
The grand doors were open, welcoming the visitors into the entryway. Signs pointed this way and that—pieces of paper dictating hallways, testing rooms. Lists of names. People were pooling in here too, some people looking bright and confident, some people on the verge of tears.
Ekko stopped to find his name. He noticed that everyone with one-word names ended up settled at the bottom, behind all of the Pilties and their houses. Figured.
It was louder inside, in the confined, echoey space. If it could be called confined. The ceilings arched above him, a fake sky inside of a fake castle. He could almost forget he was inside. He caught snippets of conversations he didn’t care about, fading in and out: I just thought—which was totally cool!—failed so bad—guess I can try again next—
Ekko trailed down the hallway, keeping track of the door numbers. He stopped in front of a closed door, 104. His testing room number. He was quite a bit early, so he knocked. When there was no response, he opened the door.
It was a classroom, mostly empty. Rows of desks lined from one side of the room to the other, and a giant blackboard was to his far right. It was mostly empty, because there was a girl waiting, too. She turned to face him.
Ekko’s breath caught in his chest.
She was familiar, somehow. Familiar like a dream. Big blue eyes and a pouty dark mouth. Her hair looked like it’d been cut with the blunt end of a knife, all choppy and ugly around her shoulders. Her clothes were conflicting colors and layered in order to hide the fact that the underlayers were missing pieces. Big chunky boots that were propped up on the desk in front of her. Next to them on the desk was a box, and in her hands was a blade and some metal she was messing with. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” he said. “This the right room?”
She nodded her chin to the other side of the room. There was a door there that led off to somewhere else. It had a glass window with half-closed shuttered blinds pulled down over it. The light was on. “That’s the room we’re testing in.”
“Cool,” Ekko said. His hands still in his pockets, he ran his thumbs along the seam. “You’re… undercity?”
She casts him a flat glance. A particularly strong slash of the knife against the metal made him fear a bit for his life. “What’s it to ya?” she asked, shrugging one shoulder.
“Me too,” Ekko said. “Undercity.”
Her eyes softened for a second. Then she looked him up and down and laughed. Ekko felt distinctly insulted. “Where did you get that? Scraped it off an unfortunate tourist?”
Saying he bought it felt more embarrassing than anything else. “Wanted to look Piltie,” he said. “See if it swung my chances.”
She stuck her tongue out at him, which took him aback a bit at the childishness of the gesture. “My sister always said if you needed people to mistake you for being from up here, you weren’t good enough to make it in the first place.”
“The guy who raised me always just said fake it till you make it,” Ekko said.
“Hmm,” she said. “Well, I hope you’re smarter than you look.”
The door opened, and the girl startled, swinging her feet back down to the floor. A boy left, looking somewhat dejected. A taller woman poked her head out. “Powder?” she asked, in a shrill sort of tone.
Powder winked at him and stood up, shoving the knife through her belt loop and grabbing her box. “Time to make it or break it,” she said, knocking the chair into the desk with her hip when she stood up.
The door clicked shut behind her.
Ekko sat down in the desk next to where Powder had been sitting. It somehow hadn’t occurred to him how many people from the undercity would be up here, applying. Not that he thought he was that special, or anything. But it was a dream: he had always been smart. He was content enough to hang around fixing things, but he was nearly grown, now, and things weren’t so bad anymore, down in the Lanes. Things were changing. Maybe he wanted to help.
There was chatter, through the door. He could hear them talking, but not what was being said. The shadow of Powder moved through the shade.
Then a blue glow. It started slow and then quickly, saturating the blinds and then spilling down across the floor, creeping over his desk. Mesmerized, Ekko put his hand out into the light. It shimmered on his brown skin, ocean-blue. For one tranquil moment, he thought: Matches her hair.
Then the explosion.
The glass blew into the room from the window, and the door came creaking down after that, slamming into a desk. The legs crumpled beneath it, the desk clattering into pieces on the floor. Ekko scrambled to his feet and away, heart suddenly pounding. An alarm started ringing, and he could hear people start shouting in the hallways.
The blast radius from the small amount of glass wasn’t enough to have hit him, but his adrenaline was still running on high. The wall seemed stable enough, so after a second of processing, he ran forward to the doorframe.
The woman seemed unharmed but had brightly colored powder in pink and yellow all down her front, clothes probably permanently damaged. She was panting, eyes blown wide, hand to her chest, pressed up as far against the wall as she could be.
Powder was sitting on the floor, frowning. She blew her hair out of her eyes. “Shucks,” she said. “Guess I blew it.”
There was what appeared to be a brightly painted can sitting in the middle of the room. It was still leaking blue all over the floor. The floor, the walls, and even the ceiling were all splattered the same pink-yellow-green that covered Powder’s entire face and legs. She shrugged when she saw him looking at her. “It wasn’t supposed to do that,” she said, almost conspiratorially.
Then the door behind him slammed open, and the shouting was in the classroom now, and Ekko thought: Well, there goes my audition.
But it didn’t matter. Because what had happened, when Ekko had entered the room, was that Powder had looked up at him all bright-eyed with the room destroyed and covered in mess, and Ekko had immediately fallen halfway in love.
><
Wandering the Academy hallways after curfew generally wasn’t allowed, but everyone did it from time to time. As long as you avoided the guards, you were fine. Ekko had snagged their schedule ages ago and memorized the timesheets, the patrol patterns of each guard. If there was one thing he was good at, it was intel. And he was good at a lot of things.
Ekko wanted to get back to the project he was working on. The deadline was next week and he was feeling rapidly like he was running out of time, which was probably why he when he walked into his lab, he didn’t realize there was someone else there with him until several seconds later.
He whirled around, fumbling for a weapon he didn’t have, because this was the Academy, and not Zaun—and heard the click of a gun. Saw the glint of the silver barrel as the moonlight filtered in through the window. Saw the bright blue hair of the girl holding it, her eyes narrowed.
“Powder?” he asked, breathlessly, heart thud-thud-thudding in his chest.
Powder’s eyes widened. “Who are you?” she asked, voice dangerous. It should’ve hurt, but Ekko was a little more worried about his immediate livelihood than a bruised ego.
“We met at the auditions,” Ekko said, putting his hands up. “I asked you if you were from the undercity.”
Powder glared at him for a moment longer, eyes flickering side to side, and then something like clarity settled in them. Then she grinned, toothy, and her gun was away in a twirl on her hip and her hands settled on her waist. “Oh, you had that terrible suit!”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Ekko argued, relief rushing through his veins like liquid silver.
She looked different. Not too different, but different. It had been a few years, and her hair was longer, loose but still choppy around her shoulders. Her bangs also still looked whacked at, as if she never sat still long enough for them to line up the scissors. Her face had lost a little more of that baby fat. She was leaner.
Ekko remembered her, though. Of course he did. How could he not?
“I see you made it,” she said.
“Yeah. They moved my audition back a few hours. Because you blew up the room,” Ekko said, slowly putting his hands down. Her eyes tracked the movement, but she didn’t go for her gun again, so he felt like he was in the clear. “Thanks for that.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, drawing out the you’re as she tipped an imaginary hat. “Always glad to be of service.”
“What are you doing here?” Ekko asked.
“What, a girl can’t take a look around?” Powder said. “Some people take it very personally when they’re rejected, y’know.” Her voice said she was joking, but there was a certain emphasis on personally that made her think she was a little mad.
“Most people take tours during daylight hours.”
She clicked her tongue. “I’m not most people,” she said. “Is this your lab?”
“It’s—a lab. I’m one of a couple people who does work here,” he said, turning as she started to walk around. “I’m just an undergrad, we don’t get our own labs until we’re at least graduate level.”
Powder whistled, trailing her fingers across one of the desks. There were four large ones, four stations. The one she was examining wasn’t his. She grabbed something off of it, some contraption held loosely together with chains, examined it. “This is what you guys get paid the big bucks to make?”
“We pay them, generally,” Ekko said. “I’m in on scholarship, though.”
“Then you are smarter than you look,” Powder said, and Ekko almost laughed.
She remembered him.
She found his desk and hopped up onto it, kicking her legs. He wasn’t sure how she knew it was his. Maybe a lucky guess. “You wanna see something awesome?”
Ekko wasn’t sure what he was doing here. He could argue to anyone who asked him later that the reason he wasn’t yelling for help right now is that she would have the safety off and a bullet through his heart in only a few seconds, and he was weaponless.
It was a consideration, yes. But Ekko grew up in a warzone. He wasn’t scared of her.
“Depends,” Ekko responded. “What’s something awesome?”
Powder reached into one of the bags strapped to her leg. As she opened it, some of that blue light spilled out, and Ekko went still. She pulled out the cause: a crystal. Multi-faceted, shining. It lit up the entire room, washed them out until the entire place looked like the sky at high noon. “This is magic,” she said.
“Magic doesn’t exist,” Ekko said.
“Not yet,” Powder said, and she tossed the crystal and caught it. It left an aftereffect in its wake, shimmering electric blue. “These babies are the key to it. I know it. I know it. I wanted—I wanted to show them. But I jinx everything.”
“This was your project?” Ekko said, putting a few pieces together.
“I know what they can do,” Powder said, ducking her head. Chunks of her bangs fell into her eyes, and she blew at them. “I know I can do it. I just can’t figure it out down there, I don’t have—I don’t have what you guys have, up here.”
“Where did you get it?” Ekko asked.
A bitter smile slipped across her mouth. “A job gone south,” she said. “So, boy genius? You’re going to help or not?”
><
They stayed up all night.
Ekko wheeled over as many blackboards as he could find as they ran hypothetical after hypothetical across them, chalk scrawling from one to the other right across the wood of the borders as the equations got long and the hours grew longer. It turns out Powder really did know a whole lot about what she was doing. Made sense, considering this was the only thing she’d been trying to do since she was twelve, he learned.
“It was supposed to make a little controlled firework,” Powder said, spinning in a chair until she made Ekko dizzy just watching her. “The project I presented. Instead, it exploded.” Her smile looked like a bite, all eye teeth and grimace. “The one time I don’t want something to explode… you know how it goes. Something’s missing until your dad comes into your room and puts his hands on his hips and says Little jinx, it’s right there. Your bomb has no fuse when it could save your life and it does when you need it to be a dud.”
Ekko said, “I’m sorry,” and he meant it.
Powder threw a fistful of chalk dust at his face and laughed as he choked and coughed.
She freehanded complicated formula in chalk and he sat back and watched as she finished. She stood back and they stared at their boards and she said, “It’s missing something.”
“Why didn’t the fireworks work?” Ekko asked.
“I was trying to stabilize it,” Powder said, irritated. “I’ve been working on dampening it. My most recent iteration just made it explode.”
“So…” Ekko said, gears turning in his head. “You don’t dampen it.”
Powder turned and looked at him. “You trying to kill us?” she said after a second, but her tone was wondering.
“I guess we’ll see,” he said.
><
When the crystal stabilized, the world exploded.
For a second, Ekko didn’t know what had happened. He was—weightless. His feet weren’t on the ground, and as he looked around, he realized that he was much closer to the ceiling than he had been before. He felt like he was in a dream. The world was washed crystal blue. Everything in the room was hovering, too: pens and chalk and gears, a maelstrom of debris.
As he twisted, he found Powder across from him, swimming in all that blue. She was staring at him, eyes wide. Then her face cracked into a grin, and she laughed. She laughed and laughed and kept laughing until there were tears running down the sides her face, wicking off and floating. She kicked her feet and it sent her spinning backwards, hair splaying out like she was underwater.
Powder stretched out her arms on both sides, closed her eyes. “We did it, boy genius. We fucking did it.”
Ekko felt something, then. Deep in his chest. It didn’t have a name, or if it did he didn’t know it; but it felt like something he had known his whole life. That he would know her again and again and again. That knowing her would change everything. Had changed everything. Like he knew the world was never going to be the same.
And everything was blue, blue, blue.