"It's snowing." Adrian looked down at the streetscape below, covered in a light dusting of white.

"Great." Brendan deadpanned, still not entirely awake. He was dressed in a robe he had found in the dresser in the spare room. It was too big but it he had decided that he liked it. It was well beyond anything he would normally wear. "Now we get to pretend to be a Nordic country for the next two months." Through the floor-to-ceiling windows. he watched a tram turn left through the big intersection at the centre of Briarleaf. As was the ritual every year, traffic was having a hard time adjusting to the snow. A bendy bus was struggling to pull out of a kerbside stop.

"Tea?" Adrian said, from behind the immaculate granite countertop that formed the perimeter of his kitchen. The decor was sparse, not surprising given he had moved in only a month ago.

"Longjing?" Brendan too a seat at one of the bar chairs.

"There's a bunch my relatives sent over." He pulled some canisters out of a drawer, arranged in an immaculate rosewood container. "Not sure what types these are." 

"You got any recommendations?"

He shrugged, pointed out the closest of the canisters to Brendan. "I've been taking this one for the last few weeks. It's quite good."

"Eh, I'll take it. Where's it from? Some mountain?"

"Eh, not quite. It's from the middle of China. One of the provinces."

"Hunan." He perused the characters on the side of the packet.

"You can read?"

"Only a bit of simplified. Traditional does my head in. My parents forced me to do it. I nearly had to sit my high school Matura for it. Except I dropped out. That was what they were bummed out about. I guess they'd already given up hope of me being a doctor or a lawyer a long time ago, so that was the only thing they had left. Well, that's how they sell it, oftentimes. Hey, asian parents! Did you know that magic can help with doctoring or lawyering?"

"Are you fluent in Mandarin?"

"Yes, I am fluent. I'm also fluent in orange, lemon, lime, I can understand tangelo and I can say a few phrases in grapefruit as well." He looked him in the eye across the counter. "You never know when a deranged Alpha kidnaps you and takes you to his pack and the next thing you know, you wake up from your drugged stupor trapped in his impossible citrus maze, from which no-one has ever escaped."

Adrian laughed one of his wry little laughs.

Brendan peered at the thin wizened grey strands that tumbled out into the glass beaker. Hmm?" "There aren't any leaves. It's just the shoots of the tea leaves. You'll see." He poured hot water in. Brendan watched intently as the little dried nibs gradually lightened in colour, dropped to the bottom and began to unfurl into little light green tips.

"The thing is, they do have a lot of little hairs. Be careful. They can be a little annoying. But they don't do anything. You don't notice them at all."

Owing to his condition last night Brendan hadn't had the chance to take a proper look at the place, so he had had to take a breath when he stumbled into the lounge room and realised that the space was double storey. A spiral staircase led up to door, which he assumed led to Adrian's room.

Brendan had tried to hide his surprise. "You have this all to yourself?"

"Well, occasionally my relatives visit when they come over for shopping. That's why they bought this in the first place."

"Don't they have malls in Laidlaw?"

"Well, there's this cake shop my mum swears by," Adrian said. "And there's boutiques and stuff that we don't even have. It pays to be closer to power, sometimes."

"So you drive over? Or take the train?"

"We fly, usually."

Brendan thought of all the "short-haul plane flights are a policy failure" memes he had saved on his phone.

His reverie was broken by Adrian bringing his cup of coffee over to the counter. He glanced at his own cup of tea, where the shoots were still unwinding. He decided to give it a while to cool down. His tastebuds were remarkably sensitive to heat. He didn't want to burn himself. "I was thinking about last night," he said, taking a tentative sip of his tea. "You know the merpeople, right?"

"Yes. Historically marginalised. But we can't evict them, because of the century-old spell that protects them," Adrian completed. He sounded like he was well-read on the issue, at least more well-read than anyone Brendan had ever met. "Anyone who disturbs their territory will be met with severe misfortune."

"Well, you know more than most. Most people just buy the line that it's a marine conservation area. See all the people who are mad they can't get trawling licenses. If only they knew."

"Why do they have to do it there? Apart from the obvious campsite connection. There's a merman community there. The largest on the west coast. Over 9,000 people. Nobody's ever been down there. Except for the occasional scuba diver."

"We should have ourselves a nice field trip." Brendan said. "You free next weekend? We should go and take a look."

"It'll fit into the schedule." Adrian gulped his coffee. "What I don't get is, what the hell does your school have to do with merfolk? Unless there's some weird connection..."

"How did we get to this mess?" Brendan sighed. "Well, it's a long story. I guess I didn't explain it well enough before, because of everything happening and stuff."

"I'm ready for it," Adrian said.

Brendan looked unenthusiastic about that. "So basically there's two different types of magic. old school and new school. They're all part of the same system but there are some differences. Carleton is New School. Most of the other schools still use old school. But they're in the other side of the border and we barely have any contact with them. We're heretics in their view. And anyway, completely different in every way."

Brendan took a sip of his tea. He had been right to wait. It was just the right temperature. "Carleton was an old school which was on its last legs, and then an enterprising fellow called Halberstam decided to turn it into a for-profit magick school. He came up with the most posh name he could think of, Carleton, and went all out on the advertising. He was doing away with all that stuffy old school stuff. Only new school things here! It didn't help that many of the old schools were having, er, shall we say, a number of scandals at the time. And the parents came. And through that he was able to build influence. Our endowment is in the tens of millions. That's incredible for a school that's only around thirty years old. And then the thing happened."

"What happened?"

"The Responsible Use of Magick Act happened."

"What did they do?"

"Well, there was the pileup. And then there was the muck-up day prank. The matura class decided to turn a bunch of ticket inspectors into vultures. They were going to turn them into pigs, but that was a bit too on the nose."

"Oh."

"Now they have to report their activities to the government every month and they have to submit proposals every time a pin drops. Environmental impact statements, the works. Everything is regulated like an army base. That's why they have those massive bulky suits in the science labs. It's revenge from the public servants for messing with one of their own. The other side-effect is that after the pileup and the vulture fiasco they couldn't recruit openly anymore, the Education Department revoked their permit. Can't even put the word magic on the prospectus, even if it's not in, y'know, that context. They couldn't even go to all of the fairs that all the Old School institutions go to. So they had to get creative."

Brendan sipped. A small tea leaf went in with the tea. He chewed with the corner of his mouth. He bit through the leaf as if it were butter. Completely smooth. He couldn't remember when he had developed the habit, but it was a long time ago. The astringency of the leaf dissolved in his mouth. Bitter with an earthy undertone. It tasted of all the places where it had been dried. Probably a bunch of concrete courtyards.

"They have a company that participates in science fairs at schools all around the country. The education department actually footed the bill for this. That's how convincing it was. If you went on their website you'd think they have no connection to magic at all. They do science. That's what it says. Anyway, they usually have the biggest stand at these science fair events. Not to mention that they do it for free. They have all these experiments for you to do. The usual stuff. Elephant toothpaste and so on. But instead of the actual chemical reaction the reaction is magical, and your input determines how it works out. And you know if you have talent you get recruited. As it turned out, I had a lot of ability with those things. And so they offered me a place. They get you a scholarship. They arrange for you to sit the test with all the other scholarship students. The test doesn't matter because they've already decided what they want to do, but it's just a formality so you can show your parents something.

"They thought I got in on a real scholarship. I wasn't even that good. I'd always had kind of middling grades. Good by the standards here, but not good enough by my parents' standards. They were always thinking up of ways of making me study more. Trying to get me into more advanced classes and stuff. My parents still don't really understand what happened. They just thought it was a normal private school. Nothing out of the ordinary. I've tried explaining to them over and over again. But they just don't get it. They still think I got in because I did well in the scholarship test.

"You'd think it was about being born into the right family or something. That was what they thought in the old days. That's part of the Old School thought. You have to be from the right family to succeed, there's like five extended families that carry the whole thing. But it turns out you can hack magic just like you can hack exams. That's what New School is all about. Magical processes can be mathematically described, you know. They hang out at all the scholarship training places to recruit people. I know because that's how I heard about it first. They didn't recruit me there thought, because I was a fucking hopeless student. You'd talk to these people. Sometimes you'd even talk to their parents when they came to get you, in Chinese. Tell them about these tests and stuff. Tell them you hand out full rides. That gets them going."

"How does Beidzner fit into all of this?"

"He orchestrates the whole thing. Nobody suspects him because he presents himself as the laid-back hippie teacher. Actually he's probably the strictest of them all. He's a control freak. He just doesn't conform to the usual requirements of being a teacher. He hates the assignments and the marking systems and stuff. He thinks it's all rather stupid and not good enough for his standards, so he came up with his own syllabus, which is ninety percent just his students doing unpaid labour for his friends' companies."

"Do they approve? The school, I mean?"

"Well, they don't like it too much but they tolerate it because it gets results. Extremely good results. And it gets them connections with powerful people. Which is beneficial for them.""Does he approve of what they're doing? Halberstam? Wouldn't he be a bit worried about it all? Try to rein it in?"

"Well, they're old school mates," Brendan explained. This whole thing gave him a sense of purpose he hadn't felt in a long time. It was a good feeling, a warm feeling, like a hug from an old friend he had not seen for some time. "Honestly it's probably more the other way around. Beidzner doesn't agree with Halberstam over how the school is run. As I mentioned, about the curriculum and stuff. But he just goes along with it, as a favour for a friend. He's that kind of person. He just has to help them. He would give you the shirt off his back and then conjure up another shirt for himself."

"Ah." Adrian relaxed. Brendan realised just how tense he was, sitting here in a penthouse lounge room in one of the priciest postcodes in Corviston. He was sure Adrian had already noticed this too, but was not letting it be known. Just being polite. It was what people did. "So why do they like using you guys so much? The companies? What's the appeal, apart from, y'know, being friends with Beidzner?"

"Hmm. Why do we need magic, if we have all this modern technology? Well, you know what the biggest request we used to get from big business? Breaking the merfolk spell." Brendan paused for a moment. "Do you have any idea how much development there could be if they could find a way to break the spell? Fish farms. Trawling. Abalone. There's billions to be made. If only we could break the spell. That was what I was working on at the time. Breaking the spell. You know, it's been his pet project for some time now. He's always wanted to do it. He's obsessed with it. He's researched them extensively. Read every book on them, even tracked down ones that had changed to human living in the city. It's all he does outside of work. Probably why he's gone off the radar as of late. That's probably what this latest project's all about. He's worked out a way to do it, and he's promised it to Halberstam, and they're going to make millions off this. Though he's probably going to refuse it all or something and just continue drawing his wood shop teacher's salary. He does it for the kicks. And as you can imagine, as someone being mentored by him, there's a lot of pressure. So much is resting on you. You're the chosen one, the one with the key to solving all this."

"You were the chosen one?"

"Well, not in the traditional sense of the word. I wasn't like the one the prophets had foreseen would defeat the great evil or anything like that. I was just the person in my cohort who Beidzner judged to be the most magically talented. I guess the pressure was very classical chosen one. It was crazy. I just couldn't take it anymore. It felt easier just to let everything go and disappear. I hated getting up each morning and going to school. I didn't even think about how I would explain it to my parents. How would that even go? I just didn't care about it. You know, I just walked away. You don't do that. It's not done. For the first few days, I just went to the local mall and surfed the web in the McDonalds until it was time to go home. It took me a week until I got the courage to go up to my parents."

"And what did they say?"

"They took it surprisingly well. They couldn't understand why I had done it, but they forced me to go to a remedial school and get my high school diploma." Brendan had never really believed the people who told him that talking things out made it better, but after this he really felt like a weight had lifted off his chest. "You'll be there on Saturday? You know where the Old Crossroads Mall is? It's on your daily commute."

"That big mall near the Arrowhead Road exit?"

"That one. There's a tram stop in there somewhere. Meet me there..."