by Megan Crewe
My legs locked as I watched a significant portion of the crowd shift toward the table. My family was an obvious target for protest. As giddy as the atmosphere was making me feel, I wasn’t sure it’d be wise to hang myself out quite that blatantly yet.
I could at least listen to the suggestions and see if I had anything useful I could add without exposing my ties to the people they saw as the enemy. What had I come here for if not to do something?
I dragged in a breath and marched over to where a swarm of bright-eyed volunteers was gathering.
Chapter Seven
Rocío
“Damn, there are even more boxes back here,” Sam said, accompanied by the rasp of tarp heaved aside. “Come on, let’s get this out of here.”
Brandt was already hauling one of the crates of guns packed in straw out of the garage. I hustled over to Sam next to one of the more junior operatives, a girl named Joselin who couldn’t have been more than a couple years older than me. With a swish of her chestnut-brown ponytail, she grabbed one of the boxes and bounded out.
Our unit had located this stash of magically enhanced weapons thanks to a tip and some careful scanning. ’Chanting weapons was illegal under international law, but I guessed that was exactly why the Borci Za Spravedlivost figured they could give their nonmagical militant allies an edge that way.
At least no one would get to use the weapons now. We were taking them back to the base for neutralizing. But seeing the stark black muzzles and egg-shaped grenades in the dim light of the electric lantern made me shiver at the thought of how many stashes there might be that we hadn’t found yet—and who those insurgent groups might be planning on using them against.
“Careful,” Sam reminded me as I lifted the box next to him. “Keep hearkening the magic in them as you go. If anything shifts in a direction that feels bad, drop it and cover yourself.”
“Got it,” I said. I’d run ten missions in the last two weeks, with more training and debriefing filling the rest of my waking hours, but tension still wound through my muscles as I hefted the crate of weaponry. No bulletproof vest, ’chanted or not, was going to save me if all this ammunition exploded.
The cold nipped at my cheeks as I carried the box over the cracked concrete of an alley to the gravel parking lot where we’d landed the helicopter. This far north, Sam had said we might start seeing snow as soon as next month. From inside the chopper, lit by its interior lights, Desmond gave me a quick nod where he was perched at the communications array. His face was tight with concentration, his lips moving with a near-silent casting.
I shoved the crate into the back of the chopper and jogged back to the garage. I tramped inside just in time to hear Joselin say, “What the heck is this?”
She’d tugged a dirt-stained paper out from under one of the boxes. Her thick eyebrows drew together as she squinted at it. “Crap. That’s a schematic for an explosive ’chantment, isn’t it?”
Sam leaned over with a frown. “It is. There’s an address in the instructions.” He tapped some writing in Cyrillic near the top of the page. “If it’s nearby, we’d better take a look and see if they planted the ’chantment there and if it’s still active.” His hand rose to press the button on the mic clipped to his hoodie. “Powell, we need you to look up an address. I’ll send you the image.”
“On it,” Desmond said over my earpiece. A minute after Sam had snapped the photo, his voice returned. “Five blocks north and two east. A tall stone place with a red roof. Do you want me to direct my scans to that area now?”
“I think you’d better. And call back to the base to see if they’ve got any idea why that building would’ve been targeted.” Sam turned to the rest of us. “Brandt, Lopez, inspect the building. If you find the ’chantment, deal with it if you can, or call it in if you need backup.”
Brandt motioned for me to follow him with a jerk of his hand, his gaze even more steely than usual. We set off at a lope down the street, past the grimy clapboard faces in this desolate part of town.
A couple blocks along, the road widened with freshly patched pavement, and the houses got a little bigger. A sedan growled around a corner up ahead, and I swerved my path closer to the walls.
Brandt glanced at me with an expression that might have been approving of my caution or accusing me of cowardice. Sometimes I had trouble telling whether he had any emotions other than anger and frustration, especially in the intermittent lamp glow that deepened the shadows around his blunt features and made the dark blond spikes of his short-cropped hair look like little knives.
Desmond’s voice crackled into our ears again just as a narrow stone house with a red-shingled roof came into view in the dimness ahead of us. “The house belongs to the cousin of an Estonian government minister—one who’s voted against Russian-friendly policies. Either they’re trying to punish her by going after her family, or they’re hoping they can take her out if she pops in for a visit.”
“It doesn’t look like anything has already been detonated here,” Brandt said into his mic. He slowed coming up on the house.
An off-key twang of energy prickled over my skin. My gaze darted along the trail I sensed.
“The front step,” I said with a shiver. “The explosive ’chantment is there.”
Brandt’s brow furrowed as he rattled off a scanning casting. His jaw clenched even tighter. “The ’chantment is active,” he reported into his mic. “We can get rid of it.”
The impression of the explosive made my stomach churn. The ’chantment seemed to be churning too, an erratic whirl of magic I could hearken embedded in the concrete step. I made myself step closer despite my uneasiness. It didn’t feel all that big, at least.
Movement in a window across the street caught my eye. The lamplight glanced off the pale form of a girl not much older than me leaning close to the glass. Her fawn-brown hair was yanked back from her face, and her arms were crossed over what looked like a scruffy jean jacket. Our concealment ’chantments must have been wearing thin, because she was staring right at us.
“What?” Brandt said, jerking around to follow my gaze. The girl had already vanished into the darkness beyond the window.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just a neighbor looking out to see what’s going on.”
“Half of them probably think the bomb was a great idea,” he muttered.
The locals might not be any more enthusiastic about us than he was about them. What would they make of our sudden appearance here? Did they see welcome helpers or unwanted intruders? A crawling sensation ran up my arms, almost as unpleasant as the twang of the explosive ’chantment. I had the urge to run all the way back to the warm lights of the base. As if I even could have if I’d let myself.
I had my own mission here, and it’d been slow going so far. I knew I’d gained at least a little of Sam’s respect during my missions under him. Brandt still seemed skeptical. Turning tail and fleeing wasn’t going to earn me any points with him, that was for sure.
“How do you want to handle it?” I asked. The strategies we’d learned for neutralizing magical bombs flitted through my head. This was the first time I’d encountered one in the field.
Brandt circled around to the opposite side of the steps. “Either no one’s home or they’re all asleep. No point in causing a commotion. We conjure a shield around it together, solid as we can make it, and then I’ll detonate the explosion inside that.”
The instant he said the word “detonate,” the magic humming around me flinched. I winced inwardly. But this was a chance to convince him. Did I dare to hope he might feel for himself the magic’s relief if we handled this more peacefully?
“We don’t have to set it off to stop it from hurting anyone,” I said. “It’ll ruin part of the house like that. Why don’t we diffuse it?”
He made a scoffing sound. “Because that’ll take tons more time and energy? The government will pay them back for the damage.”
It couldn’t pay back the magic for the harm done there. I didn�
��t think I could talk about that yet without sounding crazy, though.
“It won’t take me that long,” I said, dropping to my knees by the steps. “I’ll show you.” My fingers curled into my palms for a second before I extended them. I didn’t want him to see my hands shake.
Even Hamlin had said that a lot of the time just detonating an explosive was safest unless the casting was incredibly simple. But if I couldn’t do this, I might as well be some Confed drone.
“Lopez,” Brandt started, and I decided I couldn’t give him any more time to argue. With his few years of seniority, he could technically order me around, but he hadn’t told me directly not to try yet.
“Make your shield,” I said quickly. “We’ll want to be safe about it either way.” Then I launched into the soft strains of a soothing melody.
Brandt cursed, even though I wasn’t really casting yet. He probably couldn’t tell. As he started conducting his conjuring in poetic Latin, I let my intent simply flow through the energy around me. The erratic cadence of the explosive ’chantment niggled at me even more unnervingly. All I wanted to do right now was test the rhythms of the casting’s structure, hearken how those whirling threads had been woven together.
I’d watched Finn dispel a malicious ’chantment of his own during the Exam. His casting had worked very differently from the one placed here, but he’d unraveled the tangles of magic bit by bit. I should be able to manage the same.
The magic tickled at my senses as if nudging my attention. Yes, that faint whine of a note felt a little loose to my hearkening. And it threaded right through the hot crackling center of the ’chantment. If I could tease it out, ever so slowly…
I murmured a lyric about unwinding and slipping apart, narrowing my focus to that one piece of the ’chantment. It clung in place for a second, and then it rippled away, taking a shred of the sense of heat with it.
My pulse pounded against my skull. I turned my attention to a different wavering thread within the ball of contained power. My lips moved again: cool it, relax it, ease it apart.
The crackling sensation ebbed. I tugged at the tangle with the roll of a lyric off my tongue, and the rest of the ’chantment disintegrated.
My shoulders sagged as I released my focus, every muscle trembling. That work had taken more out of me than I’d realized. But I’d done it. That was what mattered. I pressed my hand to the ground to steady myself, just for a second, and then shoved myself upright, willing my legs not to wobble.
“The explosive is diffused,” I said into my mic.
Brandt smacked my hand away from my collar. “What the hell was that?” he demanded.
I stared at him, any words I might have said catching in my throat. His face had turned red in the dim light, his mouth twisted with an emotion it didn’t take any special insight to read. He was furious.
“It’s done,” I said. “It didn’t take very long.” We wouldn’t get into how much the process had drained me.
“How much time have you spent around explosive casting, newbie? You could’ve blown it up in our faces.”
“But I didn’t,” I said. “I knew I could handle it. We had—”
“It doesn’t matter!” Brandt burst out. He forced his voice lower. His hand jabbed toward the houses around us. “You know what matters? Just us. Our unit. These people don’t like us any more than the damned Borci Za Spravedlivost do. We get in, we do what we have to so the commanders will be happy, and then we get the hell out. You don’t take risks to protect somebody’s front step.”
Was that the way he saw things—we were only looking out for ourselves? Nobody else, not even the locals the militants were targeting? I didn’t know how to argue about that. But I did feel the grateful embrace of the magic slipping around my shoulders like a shawl made out of warm silk.
“What if that’s not the only thing I was protecting?” I said. My throat tried to constrict around the words, but I made myself keep going. I had to try. “Can’t you feel it? The way the—”
Desmond’s voice blared through my earpiece. “All operatives, back to the chopper. We got a distress signal from the base. There’s some kind of attack—they say they need all the assistance they can get. Hurry!”
My stomach flipped over. Brandt’s eyes widened. We took off for the helicopter without a thought given to the argument we’d been in the middle of.
Our feet thundered down the streets so loudly I wouldn’t have been surprised if the whole town could hear us passing. The helicopter’s blades were already whirring when we reached the parking lot. Sam wheeled his arm, urging us faster.
The chopper lurched into the air the second Brandt and I scrambled on. My back thumped against the window. I sank onto the bench, my lungs burning from both the run and the casting I’d done to diffuse the bomb.
I was tired. How much fight did I have in me now?
How big a risk had diffusing that ’chantment really been?
“Do we know anything about the attack?” I asked. No one had ever mentioned any concern the base might be hit. The officials kept it so tightly secure, I couldn’t even have said exactly where the compound was on a map, and the outer walls tingled with magical defenses. Had our enemies not only tracked us down but broken through those wards?
Desmond was tapping away at his computer controls. “They weren’t able to say a whole lot. I think everyone there is busy defending the place. All tonight’s squads have been called back.”
Prisha and Leonie had been out on missions of their own with other groups of more experienced operatives. They’d be flying into the line of fire right now too.
“We’ll hurl those pricks right back to where they came from,” Brandt said, but his knuckles were white where he was gripping the bench. The bravado was a front.
“How did they find us?” Joselin asked, her boots drumming against the floor.
No one had an answer to that.
I could tell we were almost at the base when the magic started twitching around me, tugging and releasing my joints with an increasingly urgent frequency. I’m on my way, I thought at it. This is as fast as I can come.
But what was I going to do once we arrived? Even at well-rested, I wouldn’t have been able to stop a whole army of insurgents from hurling destructive castings.
The magic was counting on me. I was the only one who even understood how much it was hurting. I swallowed hard.
“They’ve breached the base walls,” Desmond reported, his voice strained. “Commander Revett says to get in there and push them back, any way we can.”
The helicopter landed with a jolt in the yard outside the domed building. Its lights revealed scorch marks around a wide crack down the middle of the concrete wall. An image glowed beside it like magical graffiti: a ghostly face with round eyes and lips drawn back in what could have been a scream or a battle cry. That was the Borci Za Spravedlivost’s calling card when they wanted to make sure they got credit for their crimes.
That was all I had time to notice before a few figures darted past, wearing glowing white masks with the same anguished grimace. They threw a wave of searing heat toward us. I spat out an instinctive lyric to shield, to chill, with a rush of gratitude for all the drills Hamlin had pushed us through. My voice merged with others all around me.
Sam hollered something. Light flashed in the distance, followed by the grunt of a fallen attacker. “Go on, go on,” he said. “I’ll cover the rest of you. You focus on securing the base.”
We ran. I jerked my gaze away from the bodies of two of the base’s soldiers sprawled nearby, and my heart lurched at the sight of the door they’d been guarding wrenched halfway off its hinges. How the hell could we secure that?
A bolt sizzled past me, clipping the back of my hood. Despite the protective ’chantment, pain shot down my spine. I dove into the hallway.
The magic flailed around us. More burnt streaks marked the wood-paneled walls, the spongy carpet. An almost chemical tang hung in the air. Our pseudo-chalet di
dn’t feel so cozy anymore.
Commander Revett’s voice leapt from my earpiece.
“A few of us are blocked in the communications room. We need immediate assistance.”
Two masked figures burst from a room down the hall. With a shouted lyric, they whipped a hail of razor-sharp shards our way. Joselin and I belted out words to deflect the attack, an ache seeping across my scalp as I did. Brandt yelled a line with a smack of his hands against his chest and a stomp of his feet: the shockwave technique we’d learned in training.
His casting propelled its energy down the hall, and the magic wrenched at me, yanking my breath from my lungs. One of our assailants toppled, blood splattering from a head wound. The other dodged around a corner up ahead.
Brandt charged after the fleeing figure, Joselin on his heels. I raced after them, veering right toward the communications room. Desmond’s feet thumped right behind me.
The magic felt as if it were tearing at my arms, my hair. I don’t know what to do, I thought at it. I’d practiced adapting the new techniques we’d learned—in secret, not under Hamlin’s watch—but I’d never tried them on an actual assailant. My breath was coming shakily, my head throbbing. What if I couldn’t pull it off?
We hurtled past another limp body—one of our translators, I realized with a swallowed sob—and around a corner. Three more masked figures were poised outside the communications room door.
All my training took hold. I didn’t let myself think, just threw myself into the same casting I’d just watched Brandt do.
I’m sorry. They’ll keep hurting you if I don’t stop them somehow.
Desmond stomped his feet in time. Our combined blast knocked the figures right over. Two of them slumped, and Desmond nodded to me as if acknowledging the success of our collaboration. But even though I’d watched bodies crumple hundreds of times in simulations over the last several weeks, the reality socked me in the gut.