Sage Kennedy's laptop was open on Google, the cursor flickering in the search bar. No results had shown. With a short sigh, she closed the lid and put it away. Miss Jones was still rambling at the front of the class. Unless she suddenly decided to start teaching next year's work, Sage had no reason to pay much attention. Considering how well she'd done in her AS Level mock exams, she didn't need to be arrogant to admit that she'd probably get straight A*s at the end of the year.

Her chestnut brown hair fell neatly onto the desk around her busy notebook. Her amber eyes gazed sideways intently at the pen she was using to write theories on a story she'd heard what felt like forever ago, that had resurfaced in the conversation of five of the more 'popular' girls at school during Biology. They'd treated it like your average horror story or fairy-tale - as if there was no truth to it at all, just a story meant to invade your sleep. Despite how dismissive the other girls had been of it, it had sparked a hope within Sage and she couldn't let it drop. Her memory held onto each word as if they were a life ring in a world drowning in normalcy.

Normal wasn't just boring; it had to be wrong.

Only one person sat with Sage at the back of every class. Lexis Atwood was an albino girl of the same age; her eyes like blue-tinted crystals.

Lexis was the tough girl. At six-foot-tall, not many people thought to mess with her anyway, but no one dared to after they'd met her. She wasn't mean or aggressive, and anyone who took the time to learn that was treated with respect; she was simply underestimated. Sage had been one of the first people to look past her skin condition and see her personality, and even if Lexis didn't say it as such, Sage knew that meant something to her best friend.

Reading over Sage's shoulder, like only she was allowed to do, Lexis read the title. It was in quotation marks and in hand-written italics:

'Legend has it, if you look into a mirror with a cup and a candle, a portal to another world will open...'

Sage was scribbling idea after idea onto the over-flowing double page, speculating the different meanings of every word and the conditions of the concept. When she thought she'd written every possibility, she read over what she'd written.

"Are we opening a portal? Bit of a jump from pulling an all-nighter just to read the first two Born Of Rust books," Lexis asked her with a short laugh, opening the doorway between reality and the endless scope of thoughts.

"I can't believe I did that just to be told there's a third one that isn't even out yet," Sage said, the annoyance ringing clear through her huff of laughter. "But if I can figure out how, then yes, the plan is to open the portal," she said after a pause, keeping her eyes on the page so Lexis couldn't see them shining.

That day, when the bell rang for the end of school, Sage walked home rather quickly and settled into her bean bag by the window, pen lid between her teeth and notebook open on her knees.

From what she could gather upon further research, most folktales weren't to be taken completely literally. For example, the mirror could be any reflective surface or where one would go to meet oneself. It meant she may take the full week to work out what it meant, but that only made her want to work on it more. To get it figured out before Sunday evening - a nonsense deadline she'd given herself because she could. 'Just over six days is bound to be enough,' she thought.

She started with the cup. Cups were used to hold what someone would drink and the only person in control of what the drink would do to those who drank it was the person who'd made it and the drink could be... anything. Anything at all.

Just as she was about to set the notebook down for the hour, the rain started to pour. The clear drops were still visible against the yellowing colour of the trees and the red brick of the houses opposite, and traced zebra pattern down her window in a constant race against each other.

Sage stared out the window for what felt like a very long moment, her thoughts cartwheeling around her skull with possibilities. The cup symbolised water, one of the foundation elements Mateo used to talk about. Soon enough, it was time to consider the candle in the story, and finding the meaning for that was much easier once the cup's riddle had been solved. Holding a flame, the candle symbolised the element of fire. That must have been it. But that left her thinking about the mirror, and that proved a much harder mystery to unravel.

Feeling the beginnings of hunger, Sage allowed herself a half hour break to eat the leftover lasagne from the night before. Leftovers had become a common occurrence; her mum forgetting she was only cooking for two.

After another few hours of chasing concepts and possibilities round the labyrinth in her head, a grin burst from within her and she beamed down at the page where she'd collected her final assumptions. As she'd been working on it, a quote she'd read in the Percy Jackson series came back to her: 'Names have power.' Perhaps that was true for real life too. So many names had elemental meanings though; so many people from so many countries. It felt like every time she worked one part out, a light turned on. But with every light she turned on, another crossroads was revealed, each as dark and uncertain as the last.

However, her mum had always taught her to look at the positive side of everything, because the negative side wasn't worth her time. So, as she said goodnight to her mum, she smiled, because there was so much she knew then that had been a blank space that morning. She was sure she was close to cracking it. With excitement in her bones, she quickly rattled off her homework from maths, physics and French before falling straight to sleep, her bedside clock reading 21:13.

The next day, she went to the library before school - hours before - and searched through as many history books and folktales as possible, since Google had proven useless earlier.

It had taken her much longer to find the right tale than she had admittedly expected. Although, once she had found the first version, she'd known where to look to gather the other four entries available. All five lay open in front of her, three of them with a date as to when it was written. Ten would have been the preferred entry count, but she wasn't about to complain too much, as the ones she did have were all dated to within two years of each other anyway. Between seventeen and fifteen years ago. So it wasn't as old a tale as she'd thought. No history book she could find, not even those on 'modern history' covered anything after the year two thousand - twenty years ago. It felt like a dead end, but it wasn't the first time she'd had that feeling, and it wasn't about to be the first where she gave up. She had a time frame now, which was more than she'd had two hours previous.

Searching back through the stories, she looked for places. Where had the people who'd written them been living? Did any of them give a clue as to where or what the mirror was? The latter question was left unanswered - for the time being, anyway - but all of the entries were quite useful for the first.

All of them had been written by people from her own town. Did that mean this mirror was local? Sage hoped so, for sake of ease. Two of the entries also had names. One had been written by a German man she recognised, a family friend: Ben Schmidt. He'd been not two streets down from where she sat. Or at least that was her assumption, since that was where he was living currently. The other had been written by someone currently working in the local hospital. They were listed as Nurse Lodge of the maternity department. She made a note of both.

The hospital got her thinking that perhaps the names she was looking for would be those given to newborns of the time the folktale - the portal - first appeared. It was a starting point at least.

She was just about to head over to the hospital when her phone lit up beside her. It was a text from Lexis:

L: You okay?

Sage noted the time; just twenty minutes left until school. Two minutes until her final alarm was due to go off to remind her to leave. However prepared she'd been, she was still normally at school long before now, and Lexis would be waiting. She threw her bag on her back and left the books on the table, stacked according to their positions on the shelves. Normally she'd have put them away herself, so she apologised on her way out and texted Lexis as she walked as fast as her short legs would carry her.

S: Better. Meet at my form room?

L: K.

Her reply was immediate, all the better for Sage as she put her phone in her pocket and jogged the rest of the way to school.

As promised, Lexis was waiting for her, leaning against one wall of the corridor outside Sage's form room - the room she went to every morning to be registered before starting lessons. At five foot one, Sage didn't even come up to Lexis' shoulders and had to stand a distance away to keep from hurting her neck as she met her friend's eyes.

"A lot to say, then," Lexis smirked, reading Sage's expression. "At break." She gave a small smile and nodded once, as did Sage, and then she pushed off from the wall and left for her own form room, her long white ponytail swinging ever-so-slightly behind her.

Sage sighed and muttered under her breath about having run out of time - which she truly had done. Just as she brought her wrist up to check her watch, the bell went. She didn't let herself focus on the negative though; bad moods were only good for procrastination. Busy until the next bell, Sage threw everything into her bag before walking to the changing rooms to wait for Lexis.

Walking down the corridor towards the school library together, Sage explained where she was up to with all she'd discovered since ten past three the previous day. It was fairly safe for them to talk in the corridors due everyone's total lack of interest in the pair. It was a superpower they were glad to have. They could go anywhere in the school and say anything they wanted and most people would have no clue they had ever been in school that day, never mind opened their mouths.

"Looking for people in our school with elemental names, then?" Lexis asked once she was caught up. They sat down in the padded swivel chairs in the library and Sage opened up the login page on the computer monitor in front of them. She was safe to specify their school since it was the only secondary school in the area.

Sage nodded as she logged in as one of her teachers, "Shouldn't be hard but may take a while." Lexis didn't say anything, just waited as Sage continued to open up a register for each form class in their year group and the one above to include all those who were of roughly seventeen years old. As each list came up, Lexis, having logged on to the neighbouring computer, looked up the meanings of each name and all parts of each. Sage then noted down the few with significantly relevant meanings. There were quite a few more than she had expected and many more than she had hoped for, but few enough that the thought of sorting through them all wasn't completely deadening.

"Kallai is one of them," Lexis said with an amused expression and a small chain of mock-thoughtful nods. Kallai Blackburn was the boy Sage had thought she'd had a crush on a year previous. There was an air of intensity and mystery about the Black boy that had always intrigued Sage, though the thick black curls and deep brown eyes hadn't helped her case. Lexis had always supported the potential relationship, if only so she wouldn't be the only giant in the group. Since then, he'd gained an extra two inches on her and was officially taller. She had mixed feelings about that, both the not wanting to be called out for her height but also needing the superlative to her name. Having never been the best at anything, 'tallest' was the best she thought she could get.

Not taking Lexis on, Sage ignored the mockery in her tone. "Honestly, if I'm right," Sage said, looking up from the paper, "I'm jealous." A quick, amused smile and then she was back to business.

"How are we sorting these?" Lexis asked. A reasonable question, it seemed, as neither could come up with an answer. "Cut the ones with the meaning in the middle name?" Lexis asked, at the same time Sage had started to do just that. A content nod and then Lexis was silent again. She logged off her computer and logged Sage out of hers for her while she narrowed down their list.

"That still leaves us with ten and, by my calculations, there should only be two," Sage said, her eyebrows furrowed so hard they almost became one. "I'll just have to ask their parents if they had any specific inspiration for the names or if they were random," Sage said, almost in defeat.

"Maybe." Then a pause. "Parents don't choose last names." Lexis said, giving Sage a pointed look before glancing at the page.

Sage read the remaining five options aloud, "Kallai, Tallie, Shannon, Coral and Aidan." As she spoke, she became a little bit brighter. "Well, Coral's connection is less so than the other two so I'll cross her out. And Shannon means 'old, wise river' and we're looking for a younger version, even if she is physically the right age. That might be a push but..." Lexis didn't argue. "Tallie Armstrong is our water," Sage reasoned, crossing out and circling the respective names.

"Aidan is 'fire', but Kallai means 'light, resting by fire, my voice'," Sage continued, "Candles only have flames, not fires. And they're used for light too."

Lexis smirked, "Your Kallai's our man."

Sage nodded nonchalantly, ignoring the 'your', and circled his name too. "Let's go and get our cup and candle then."