Wounded Magic

by Megan Crewe

  They weren’t listening. They didn’t believe me.

  I had to give them a good reason to, or I was about to be shouted off the stage.

  I inhaled deeply, bracing myself against my doubts. Imagine she was in the audience, I told myself. The girl who conjured dragons, the girl who’d resisted the Confed’s intentions with every shred of her being, without raising a hand against anyone.

  I knew what she’d have wanted me to say. Perhaps I should stop worrying about what was easiest for me and be her mouthpiece while she wasn’t here. There was a lot more than pastries I could offer if I let myself. No one else here knew as much about the inner workings of the Confed as I did.

  I drew myself up as straight as I could. “Look,” I said to the hundreds of figures peering up at me, letting that conviction flow through me, “I’m not making guesses here. I’m speaking from experience. I—I come from old magic. I’ve been around the people we’re trying to influence; I’ve talked with them; I’ve seen how they work with my own eyes.”

  Ary sucked a breath through her teeth with a faint hiss. “Sounds like you’re a spy, then, not a supporter.”

  “No!” I barreled onward before her suggestion could take root with the crowd. “I’m not going to lie. I’ve had a lot of advantages that I know other people haven’t—through luck and not because I earned them. But I obviously also know what it’s like to be judged and deemed unworthy; I know what it’s like to lose your magic. Growing up the way I did, I always knew I didn’t measure up. I worked so hard trying to be good enough, turning to every damnable exercise and meditation technique that was supposed to bolster a talent… but it was never enough. I hate that it was never enough. I hate that any of us has been made to feel we weren’t worthy of the talents we were born with.”

  I had their attention now. I could see it in the gazes fixed on me, feel it in the silence that had settled over the room.

  “I want to change all that,” I went on. “The Dampering, the wretched Exam—they shouldn’t happen. I want to put a stop to both as quickly as we can.”

  “All right,” hollered a guy with a sheen of white-blond hair, whom I’d seen hanging around Ary before. “So why don’t we go with Ary’s plan and get on with it?”

  “Because it won’t work,” I said. “Not the way we want it to. If we make ourselves look dangerous, the Circle and those who stand with them will crush us, every way they can, in the name of protecting the rest of the community. And if we go so far that we tear them down completely, do you really think the Dull government will just stand by? A lot of them are looking for an excuse to crush us themselves.”

  “What would you suggest instead, then?” Luis said at my right. I’d gotten so caught up in my speech I’d almost forgotten he was there.

  I reached for the ideas that had been gradually forming in my head over the last several weeks. “I don’t know what all the answers are,” I said. “But my parents and my grandparents were part of the early efforts leading up to the Unveiling. My whole life, I’ve listened to them talk about how the tide shifted. The thing that made the biggest difference was showing how much good we could do—good that the current policies were preventing.

  “So… if we want to get more people on our side, I think it needs to be totally clear that we’re the good guys and the Confed’s leaders are the ones in the wrong. You know, during the integration, a lot of mages played down their power and let the Dull authorities bully them because that got them sympathy. It made them look human to people who might have been scared of them otherwise. Perhaps there’s some way we can use that kind of tactic.”

  A familiar voice rose up from the middle of the crowd. “We could work with that.” Tamara gave me a nod. “Sometimes brute force can get the job done, but often your best bet is playing the game to sway public opinion. We can use the placement exams, but we don’t have to burn the place down. Blockade it and stop all those new mages from getting on with their careers. Let the Confed try to shut us down. Make them use force on us while we’re just trying to raise awareness. We could get a lot of people—mages and maybe even Dulls—considering our side.”

  “Yes,” I said with a grateful smile. “I think that plan would get us a lot closer to our goals.”

  More people were murmuring in the audience, but the tenor had shifted. Had my appeal gotten through to them?

  Luis joined me by the podium again, and I happily relinquished the microphone.

  “We’ve heard a lot of passionate commentary tonight,” he said. “Ary and Tamara have both suggested concrete actions we could take—and Finn clearly has insights we don’t want to ignore. I suggest the three of them work together organizing this protest at the college. All in favor?”

  A cheer carried through the crowd. I glanced toward Ary and cringed inwardly at her expression. She’d schooled her face blank, but the tightness of her mouth radiated resentment.

  “I believe we have a couple more people who’d like to speak on other topics,” Luis went on. “And then we can get down to the planning. Thank you for sharing, Finn.”

  I bobbed my head awkwardly and scrambled down from the stage. As I eased my way back to Noemi and Mark, several people patted my shoulder, my arm, with quick words of support in passing. It was difficult to feel too nervous, looking at all those sympathetic eyes. Perhaps I’d been wrong to think my background would be that much of an issue—at least, the nonspecific version of it. They knew I was with them regardless of where I’d come from.

  My pulse had mostly settled into its usual rhythm by the time I reached my friends. “That was awesome!” Noemi said, grinning. “I didn’t know you had that in you.”

  “Not a bad speech,” was Mark’s much more restrained assessment.

  “And what was that bit you said about exercises to improve your magic?” Noemi’s eyes had lit with curiosity.

  “There are a bunch of different strategies that are supposed to strengthen a mage’s connection to the magic,” I said. “Developing concentration, rhythm, everything associated with casting. I’m not sure how well they worked, but I think they did at least a little for me.”

  A guy was just starting to speak on the stage. Noemi tapped my elbow with hers. “I want to hear more about that later.”

  When the taxi dropped me off outside my family’s brownstone, I was still buzzing from the meeting and the tentative plan we’d started to build for the protest at the college. That must have been why I didn’t notice the car parked one house over until a gravelly baritone voice broke the quiet of the street.

  “Finnegan.”

  I jerked around. The taxi was already leaving, the growl of its engine fading as it turned the corner onto Madison Avenue. Granduncle Raymond was leaning against the side of his Lexus in the deeper shadows between the jaundiced light of the streetlamps. He tapped the end of his cane against the sidewalk.

  “Granduncle,” I said, in as even a voice as I could manage. What in Hades’s name was he doing lurking on the street at this hour?

  He pushed his stout frame off the car. “Your father said you were out with friends.” His gaze took in my clothes and returned to my face. “Not your usual friends, I’m guessing. What have you been up to, Finnegan?”

  He didn’t sound as if he knew anything definite. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” I said lightly. “What other friends do I have?”

  He waved his cane at me. “Don’t give me that nonsense. I know the look of someone who’s getting ideas too large for his head. You’re not settling down. You’re getting riled up.”

  A spark of anger lit inside me. Who was he to lecture me on what I could and couldn’t believe? As if one of the Circle members—who chose to look the other way, to stay blissfully ignorant of the torture the examiners inflicted on so many novices because the results were convenient for them—was in a position to judge anyone else.

  “I don’t know where you’re going with this, but I do know it’s none of your business what ideas I hav
e in my head or how I feel about them,” I returned.

  Granduncle Raymond blinked. He hesitated before he spoke again, as if he hadn’t expected a reply like that. I wasn’t sure I’d ever talked back to him so directly before. Up until the Exam, I’d always been striving to earn his good favor or at least offset his obvious disappointment.

  “It’s my business to protect the people I was appointed to serve,” he said. “And not to let the careless passions of a few undermine the security we’ve managed to establish. You haven’t been alive long enough to know how lucky you are to have as much as you do. Believe me, you wouldn’t want to go back to the days of riots and unchecked Dull-on-mage violence. Work out your frustrations if you must, but make sure you stay on the right side.”

  Would he be talking to me like that if he knew how much mage-on-mage violence I might have averted tonight? I couldn’t restrain a retort, though I kept my tone level. “Whatever you’re accusing me of, I can assure you I’ve got no part in it,” I said. “Can you say the same? Ignoring evils that happen under your watch doesn’t erase their existence. ‘Cui prodest scelus is fecit,’ if I need to remind you of your Seneca.”

  My granduncle’s expression shuttered. “You—”

  “Have nothing else to say to you. Good night, Granduncle.”

  I strode up to the door without a backward glance, and he didn’t call me back.

  Chapter Nine

  Rocío

  The whir of the helicopter’s blades had become so familiar that I could’ve nodded off to it if my nerves hadn’t been on high alert. I shifted on the bench next to Sam, clasping my hands in front of me to hold them from fidgeting. The magic niggled at the back of my neck and my inner arms as if it knew exactly where I’d find it hardest to ignore. It hadn’t completely settled since the attack on the base four nights ago.

  The few enemy combatants we’d taken prisoner—the ones who hadn’t died in the skirmish—had provided a little intel. Our first two leads had only turned up one minor player in the Borci network, a guy who’d managed to get his hands on some specs for the base and sold them. Commander Revett had made it clear she wasn’t satisfied with our progress.

  We need to make a decisive strike, she’d said in an operations meeting a couple days ago. This petty back and forth has gone on long enough. I want this terrorist force so hobbled that they couldn’t dream of assaulting one of our bases again.

  My gut clenched just remembering the furor in her voice. Somehow I didn’t think the kind of “decisive strike” she was talking about would differentiate between the actual killers who’d slaughtered six of our people in that one night and the locals who weren’t much more than regular civilians on the fringes of the conflict, like the guy with the specs or the boy I’d met on my first mission. Maybe I could believe those masked figures who’d wrecked our base deserved to be destroyed in turn, but the others? Shouldn’t we care who got caught in the crossfire?

  And really, when it came down to it… how were even the terrorists all that different from the examiners who’d hurt and killed novices like me before forcing some of us into their war?

  I rubbed my forehead, and Sam glanced over at me. “Everything okay, Lopez?”

  Across the cabin from us, Brandt’s gaze jerked to me, a little more eagerly than I liked. I’d felt him watching me warily during our last mission, like he was just waiting for me to make a mistake he could call me on. Still sore that he hadn’t gotten to really lay into me about the way I’d handled the bomb, I guessed.

  Next to him, Joselin had her earbuds in as always, her ponytail bobbing lightly in time with whatever she was listening to. She liked to get herself pumped up before we hit the ground. Prisha and our translator were talking in hushed voices. Desmond was monitoring the area ahead of us at his terminal, the screen zooming in at a twitch of his fingers when his limited sight needed a closer view.

  I had potential support here. And I had to work my way up to the subject I really wanted to talk about somehow. This might be a decent place to start.

  Still, I held the question in my throat for a few heartbeats before I let myself ask, “What do you think about the way Commander Revett has been talking? Is this really the first time a base has been attacked? She seems to think the situation has gotten so much worse than it used to be, that we’ve got to get so much more aggressive to push back.”

  Sam shrugged. “I’m not high up enough to be in on all the behind-the-scenes conversations, but from what I have picked up, there’s been increasing pressure from the Dull government to get ‘real’ results. Their military division is pretty nervous about ours in general, you know. The only thing scarier than magical soldiers across the ocean who might try to kill you, like the Borci, are magical soldiers right in your backyard who could decide to do the same, right?”

  The Dull government. Finn had talked about those pressures, and Hamlin had alluded to them in our training—the idea that our service here helped keep the peace between mages and the nonmagical back home. Hamlin had been venting about something to do with the Dull president during the attack on the base. But our commanders made the ultimate decisions about what missions we ran. We couldn’t just let them off the hook.

  “It’s not as if the Dull military has been able to shut down any of the terrorist groups they’re fighting,” Brandt muttered. “Every time they chop off one head, another one sprouts in its place. They should focus on their own failures.”

  “I don’t recommend you point that out to them the next time one of the Dull officials comes by,” Sam said mildly, and turned back to me. “I think we’ve been at a standstill with most of these insurgent groups for a long time. The longer we keep this holding pattern, the more likely it is someone will figure out a way to deal a catastrophic blow to us. The commanders are getting more and more concerned about dealing that blow to our enemies first.”

  I guessed that made sense, even if I knew any kind of catastrophic blow dealt with magic would probably end up being a catastrophe for all of us.

  “Has the pressure to make that kind of strike increased a lot since you started?” I asked. “How long have you been part of the special ops unit anyway?”

  “A little over eleven years,” Sam said. “And yeah, I’d say there’s been more and more talk about ‘big results’ and that sort of thing.”

  “Eleven years?” I blurted out. “I thought we were allowed out after ten. That’s what Hamlin told us.”

  Sam gave me a crooked smile. “A lot of us former Champions—the ones who make it through the first ten years—end up staying longer. When you’ve got a decade of your life you can’t really talk about, and all the baggage that comes with this kind of work… I’m not really sure what else I’d do. It’s hard for you to imagine it now, but you have your first leave this weekend. Wait ‘til you see how you feel back home.”

  I’d already been having trouble sleeping, trying to figure out how I was going to talk to Mom and Dad during those few days or how it might be when I saw Finn again after all this time. The five days we’d spent fighting our way through the Exam together had felt like an eternity at the time, but the last two months had stretched way longer. A niggling murmur in the back of my head kept popping up to ask how often he’d have been thinking about me.

  I rubbed my arms, pushing aside those thoughts. I had other things I needed to talk about right now. My throat constricted for a moment, but I might not get another opening like this. And I was running out of time.

  “What if hurting the terrorist groups like that would end up hurting us just as much, or more?” I said tentatively.

  Sam’s eyebrows rose, but he didn’t dismiss me outright. “What makes you think that?”

  “I just…” I hadn’t realized how hard it would be, trying to explain what I’d sensed from the magic, after all this time keeping it to myself. Squaring my shoulders, I forced myself to keep going. “I think the magic is alive. I don’t know exactly how, but I can hearken a sort of intent from
it sometimes, as if it has things that it wants or even needs. And any casting that hurts things, breaks things, makes it… upset. Like it’s been hurt too. Like we’re wounding it.”

  Joselin had taken out her earbuds at some point during our conversation. Now she stiffened. “You think the castings we use are breaking down the magic somehow?”

  Brandt guffawed. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. The magic is just magic, like electricity in the wires or gravity.”

  I trained my gaze on him. “I can feel it. I knew where that explosive ’chantment was without even casting a scan. You’ve seen me pick up on things no one else has.”

  Prisha shifted on the bench. “I haven’t hearkened the same things Rocío has, but…” Her mouth tensed. She couldn’t talk about our experiences during the Exam any more than I could. “I think she’s probably right,” she said. “And I wouldn’t buy into that kind of theory without a good reason.”

  I hadn’t known for sure if she’d speak up on my behalf. A startled smile tugged at my lips, and she returned it with a small one of her own.

  “I’ve got to buy into Rocío’s theories too, at this point,” Desmond put in. “Don’t you ever feel that way when you cast? Like you’re having a conversation with the magic, asking it to work with you, not just maneuvering an inanimate substance?”

  Joselin was nodding, but Brandt rolled his eyes. “Sure,” he said. “And centuries ago, people thought the sun and the moon and trees and stuff had spirits in them too. They ‘felt’ all kinds of nonsense. Why the hell should we worry about making the magic upset? With the terrorists cutting us down and the Dulls shoving us around, we’ve got to look out for each other.”

  “I think it’s an interesting idea,” Sam said, with a glance at the junior officer that looked like a warning. “Maybe I need to pay a little more attention to exactly what I can hearken.”