The Floating Room Read online

  Contents

  Title

  About This Book

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  The Common King

  Thanks from the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Brian Olsen - The Future Next Door

  Also by Brian Olsen - Multiverse Mashup

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The Floating Room

  Yesterday’s Magic: Book Two

  Brian Olsen

  About This Book

  For more from Brian Olsen, including alerts to future books in the Yesterday’s Magic series, sign up for his newsletter at www.brianolsenbooks.com.

  The Floating Room

  The Common King stands revealed…

  Chris and his friends have a new mission: rescue the magical creatures who were wrongly imprisoned. Their quest will take them across an ocean and back again, all the while hunted by two factions of logomancers.

  Formerly trusted teachers. An old friend. His own mother. And a new enemy, the Nightmare Queen, who visits Chris nightly with visions of the Common King’s crimes.

  Chris will need to draw on even greater power to protect his friends and rescue the magical creatures from the world before, but every step towards mastering his logomancy is another step closer to the evil that waits inside his mind. Inside the floating room.

  The Floating Room is the second book in Brian Olsen’s Yesterday’s Magic, a young adult contemporary fantasy series that began with The Sudden World and continues with The Common King.

  One

  Nobody’s tried to kill me for two whole weeks, so I’m in a pretty good mood. It’s a beautiful spring day in Charles Park, the biggest park in downtown Charlesville, Connecticut. Which isn’t all that big. Charlesville’s kind of small, it’s more of a town with a bunch of suburbs attached than a proper city. But my friends and I found a quiet spot, away from the pond and most of the people. We’re hidden from view on all sides by trees, so as long as we’re careful, we can practice magic without being seen.

  I’m Chris Armstrong and I’m a logomancer.

  That still feels weird to say.

  Logomancers use focal words to tap into something called the Logos and do magic. I don’t know all that much more about logomancy because most everyone’s forgotten it ever existed, and the person who was teaching me about it, my favorite teacher Mr. Miller, turned out to be evil.

  “Open up.”

  Zane Winarski, who I think of as my boyfriend even though we’ve only been dating for two weeks and haven’t actually used that word yet, is holding a strawberry out for me to eat. I don’t like strawberries all that much but it’s such a casual romantic gesture that of course I take a bite.

  Zane is beautiful and perfect. A little shorter than me, muscular, kind of rough, with short brown hair and a permanently stubbled chin that he swears he shaves clean every day, but I don’t believe him. I think he likes that it makes him look older than seventeen.

  He’s pretty much the opposite of me, physically. I’m tall and lean, with ash-blond hair and a face that grows a beard so wispy that a peach would hesitate to call it fuzz. But opposites attract, right?

  “Mmm.” I grab a napkin from our picnic basket and wipe some of the juice from my mouth. “Thanks.”

  He smiles and finishes the strawberry, then kisses me quick.

  Nate Montgomery, my best friend forever, throws his napkin at me. “Get a room.”

  Nate and his significant other are opposites in a lot of ways too, I guess. Nate’s Mohegan, with light brown skin and dark black hair that he gels into a precisely controlled mess. He’s short and fit, with a sort of stoner-style fashion sense that’s slowly getting more “style” and less “stoner.”

  His girlfriend Jasmine, on the other hand, is Irish-American with lightly-freckled white skin. She’s tall, taller than Nate, although you couldn’t tell right now because she’s lying with her head in his lap, her long, curly red hair splayed wildly around his thighs. She tsks and tickles his chin. “Aww. Somebody’s jealous.”

  Nate bristles. He scratches at the steel ring piercing his septum, and a little glob of mustard drops from his sandwich onto his vintage Led Zeppelin t-shirt. “Jealous? Jealous of who?”

  “Of their relationship.”

  “Of…what?” He notices the mustard and wipes at the glob, but it leaves a yellow smear. “Aw, man.”

  Jasmine sits up. “Oh, no! Your favorite shirt!” She grabs the bottom of it and tries to lift it off him. “Let me run cold water on it.”

  He bats her away. “Leave it, Jaz! I’m not walking around the park in just my binder. What do you mean, I’m jealous of their relationship? I don’t have anything to be jealous of. You and I have a great relationship!”

  “I know.” Jasmine stops trying to take off his shirt and instead takes a napkin, spills some water from her water bottle onto it, and rubs the stain. “We do. Maybe I don’t mean jealous exactly…”

  Alisa, the fifth member of our little clique, puts down her tablet, which she’s been buried in up until now. Alisa has a narrow, thoughtful-looking face, with dark brown skin and thin, tight braids falling down and over her shoulders. “She means resentful.”

  Jasmine nods. “That’s it. Resentful.”

  “What?” Nate pulls away. “Why would I be resentful?”

  “Because you don’t like Zane,” Alisa answers. “Because Zane used to bully you and Chris when you were kids, and you haven’t forgiven him, and so you hate that he and Chris are dating.”

  Zane reaches for another berry and pretends not to have heard anything.

  “Alisa,” I say, putting a slight tone of caution in my voice.

  “We won’t get past it if we don’t talk about it.” She shrugs and brushes back a few braids of hair. “I’ve always been a truth teller. Even more so, now.”

  “Oh, sure, you’re all hard truths with everybody else.” Nate touches his hair, checking to see it’s still as purposely mussed as it was before the battle over his shirt. “So when are you gonna tell Kenny that you’re not interested?”

  Alisa huffs. “It’s not my fault he has a crush on me. His feelings are not my responsibility.”

  “Yes! Don’t let men control your voice!” Jasmine raises a fist in the air and lowers her head. “Girl power!”

  Alisa reaches across our picnic blanket to put Jasmine’s arm down. “Jaz, that’s the black power salute. I appreciate the support but it looks really wrong on you.”

  Jasmine looks at her fist curiously. “Is that what that is? Then what’s the girl power salute?”

  I rub Zane’s knee and he smiles at me. I think we’re both grateful the conversation has moved on. Zane isn’t the same person as that kid who used to bully me and Nate. I’ve forgiven him – obviously – but, while Nate’s being nice to him for my sake, he hasn’t quite reached the point of forgiveness yet.

  Alisa
, seemingly not too interested in answering Jasmine’s question, suggests, “Maybe we should get to practicing? Are we done eating?”

  Nate takes one last bite of his sandwich, swallows, and nods. “Not that Jaz and I have anything to practice.”

  Zane and Alisa are logomancers, like me. We’ve spent a lot of time in a rarely-used storage room at our school over the past two weeks, trying to figure our magic out. None of us really know what we’re doing, and we haven’t made much progress. It’s getting frustrating, so Jasmine suggested we “have school outside” today as a way to shake things up. I don’t know if it’ll help, but I’m happy not to spend a beautiful Sunday cooped up in a windowless room.

  “Let’s keep it small,” Zane says. “Somebody might come by.”

  Jasmine stands and brushes herself off. “I’ll keep watch.” She leaves our blanket and stands a few feet away, in the direction of the pond.

  Nate lies down and covers his eyes with his arm. “And I’ll nap. Nobody turn me into a frog.”

  “Can I go first?” Alisa asks. “I’m struggling. Sometimes I wish my magic word wasn’t ‘truth.’ I can’t figure out much to do that’s useful.”

  Nate, without lifting his arm, says, “Oh, now you’re struggling with the truth?”

  She nudges him and replies, “Strictly in a magical context, I mean. I’ve been trying to find out what Mr. Miller or Mr. Liefer are up to. But nothing.” She sighs. “I should be able to know things that are true, right? Doesn’t that make sense?”

  Zane nods. “It’s about what the word means to you, right? If that makes sense to you, it should work.”

  I shift position so I’m sitting cross-legged. The three of us sit in the middle of the blanket, facing one another, with Nate lying to the side.

  “But it’s not that easy,” I say. “If we can trust what Mr. Miller told me – and maybe we can’t, but it’s a place to start – the further you go from a literal definition of your word, the harder it gets.”

  Alisa groans. “It’s hard enough already.”

  “And,” I continue, “different logomancers might have stronger or weaker connections to the Logos.”

  She blows air out of her lips. “Okay, I’m going back to basics. Zane, tell a lie. I’m going to try to make you tell the truth.”

  Nate lifts his arm. “Please lie about something dumb. I don’t need to hear your deepest secrets.”

  Zane laughs, a little awkwardly. Whenever Nate teases Zane it’s hard to tell how friendly it really is.

  “Uh…” Zane looks at the remains of our picnic. “I hate strawberries.”

  “Wait, wait!” Alisa smacks his foot. “I wasn’t ready.”

  She furrows her brow and focuses on him. Her lips move slightly as she thinks through the command she wants to give him.

  “Alisa,” I say. “You’re moving your lips again.”

  “Argh!” She slaps her knees, then shuts her mouth tight. After a moment, she nods at Zane.

  “I…” He stops, frowns, then continues. “I…hay…I hay. I haaaaaayyyyyy.” He sounds drunk. “I haaaaaaate.” He rubs his lips. “Ssssssssstrawwwwww. I haaaaaaate ssssstrawberries. Man, that was hard to say.”

  Alisa slumps. “But you still said it.”

  “It was obvious he was lying,” I say.

  Zane nods. “Yeah. And I knew what you were doing. I’ll bet if I wasn’t braced for it, I wouldn’t have been able to push through like that. You should try it on somebody who doesn’t know.”

  She brightens a little, but then slumps again. “There’s an ethical quagmire. Too heavy for a picnic.” She leans back on her hands. “You go, Zane.”

  “Okay!” He snaps his fingers. “I’ve been practicing at home. Check this out.” He’s silent for a moment, then cups his hands like he’s holding water, and says, “Shadow.”

  A black shape appears in his hands, about the size of a baseball. It’s not a perfect sphere, though. It’s kind of bumpy.

  “Oh,” I say. “Cool.”

  Zane bites his lip. “Do you like it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Alisa peers at it. “It’s just a shadow shape. You’ve done this before. You’ve done it better. This one’s all lumpy.”

  “No, it’s a sculpture!” He holds it closer to my face. “It’s you! It’s a bust of your head!”

  “Oh!” I force a smile. “Yeah, okay! Cool!”

  “Do you like it? I spent a lot of time on it.”

  I start to say how much I love it, but find myself saying instead, “It’s so black I can’t make out any features. I can sort of see it’s a head now that you tell me, but it could be anyone. It just looks like a black blob.” I smack my hand over my mouth. “Alisa!”

  Alisa grins ear-to-ear. “You were right, Zane, it is easier if the person doesn’t know!”

  Nate puts his palm up and Alisa high fives him. He immediately goes back to pretending he’s not listening.

  I rub Zane’s back. “Sorry.”

  He dissipates his piece of art. “It’s okay. Other people can’t see the details, I guess.”

  “It looked like me, to you?”

  He nods. “Yeah. The shape of shadows is crystal clear. And I can see in the dark all the time now. I don’t even have to think my word.”

  “Wow. You’re getting good.”

  He snorts. “I’m finally good at learning something. Too bad we’re not getting graded.”

  Alisa nods at me. “Your turn.”

  “Okay. I want to try something new. I haven’t practiced this at all.”

  “World premiere,” Zane says.

  “What are you going to do?” Alisa asks.

  “I’m going to try to make fire move from one place to another. Slow and controlled, not a blast of flame.”

  “That’s it?” Nate lifts his head. “Dude, you can literally fly. I don’t understand why you bother doing anything else.”

  I look up. Past the trees, the blue sky seems to go on forever. “I haven’t flown since the big throw-down in Winston Hall. I’m kind of afraid to do it outside.”

  My word is “sun,” so I mostly do things with heat and light. I managed to fly – more float, really – by thinking about how the sun rises, but that was when I was fighting for my life. Flying seems advanced to me, so I’m back to working on the basics for now.

  I have a good reason not to want to move too quick with my magic. My friends know about it, and I think they get the real reason I don’t want to push myself.

  I don’t even want to think about it.

  Alisa opens her mouth and I’m pretty sure she’s about to blurt out the exact thing I don’t want to think about, but Zane is in tune with me and he cuts her off.

  “I get that,” he says. “I’ve been wondering if I could maybe teleport through shadows. Like, step into one somewhere and step out of another somewhere else? But I’m afraid to try it in case I get lost or stuck in a wall or something. I think I’ll work my way up to it.”

  “Good idea.” I nudge him. “I don’t want you getting lost. I just found you.”

  Nate rolls over onto his side. “Barf.”

  Zane flicks my shoulder. “Show us your new trick, already. Make some fire fly, firefly.”

  I smile at him, and hold my index fingers out about two feet apart from each other. The first part is easy. I command my finger to burst into flame, while also commanding the fire not to burn me. I describe, in my head, exactly the size and positioning of the fire that I want, and how hot I want it. This was the first trick I learned. And I don’t even have to say my word out loud to do it anymore. Just think it.

  Sun.

  A little orange jet of flame shoots out from my left index finger. The fire surrounds the tip, as far down as the nail reaches, and extends out about three inches. No, exactly three inches, since that’s what I told it to do.

  Logomancy is about communication. You tell the world what you want to happen, and if you’ve communicated effectively, the world does what you want.
The tricky part is you have to convey all that specific information using just one word.

  I could shoot the flame at something. I’ve done that before. But I want more control than that.

  Flame. I want you to form into a sphere, then float slowly to my other finger. Then reform your current shape around that finger.

  What else? Take a five count to get from one finger to the other. A slow five count.

  Oh, and don’t burn my other index finger either. That part’s important.

  I take everything I want, and I put all that intention into my voice as I look at the flame and say, “Sun.”

  The fire wobbles. It dances around on my finger, but doesn’t form into a sphere.

  “Sun,” I say again.

  It goes out.

  I drop my fingers, and my head. “Damn it.”

  Zane pokes my ribs. “Try again.”

  Alisa nods. “New spells are hard. Give it another go.”

  “Okay.” I hold my fingers out again and light up the left one.

  Alisa looks past me with wide eyes. I’m already turning to see what she’s looking at as she cries out, “Wait!”

  Too late.

  Kenny Pillman is there, next to an oblivious Jasmine, who’s looking at her phone with her earbuds in. Kenny is a friend of ours, but he’s not in our little magic club. For a very good reason.

  Sometimes when people see me do magic, they feel a compulsion to kill me using magic of their own. We don’t know who’ll do this and who won’t, which is why we usually practice where nobody can see us.

  Kenny is staring right at me. And my finger is still on fire.

  And judging by the look of horror and anger that washes over him, and the way his body tenses, and his fists clench, I’m pretty sure he’s about to try to kill me.

  Jasmine looks up and takes out one of her earbuds.

  “Oh, careful, guys,” she says. “Kenny’s here.”

  Two

  Not too long ago, the world was completely different. It was filled with magic and looked like a cross between a fantasy land and a Renaissance fair. About three weeks ago, that world got erased, written over with our world, in what people now call the Moment. Anybody who was alive in the previous world experienced a sensation of confusion when the spell that caused the Moment was cast. Most people from the world before were normal and didn’t have any magic, so even though we knew Kenny felt confused during the Moment, that didn’t necessarily mean he was a logomancer.