by Megan Crewe
I’d spent my whole first week after my leave back in training with the guy who’d replaced Hamlin. Then I’d been let out of the base for a few low-key missions, ones they’d figured I couldn’t screw up much, just to see how I handled myself. I didn’t think the commander had stuck me with operatives I hadn’t worked with much before—other than Brandt, who’d been along for each one—by coincidence. The higher-ups liked that he kept an eye on me.
This was the first major mission I’d been assigned to since the interrogation. The first one where I’d be called on to compel the magic to harm, maybe even to kill.
“They were concerned about my loyalties,” I said. “I guess they figured I might have been trying to help the Borci, not just the magic. I just figure, why destroy something if you can just disarm it? Why hurt someone if you can stop them without that? Especially if it hurts the magic in turn. I don’t want to lose it.”
“Gods, no.” Joselin shuffled her feet again, looking down into the shadows of the alley below us before raising her eyes to me. “Sometimes we don’t have much of a choice what we cast, right? When it’s down to the wire… But I get what you’re saying.”
She fell silent for a long moment, her jaw working. Then she inhaled sharply. “Before the Exam, I thought I was a pretty good person, you know? But in there, to make it through… I think about the decisions I made, and honestly, it scares me. I had no idea I could be that selfish, or that vicious. I hate what came out of me.”
Regret had turned her voice raw. It stirred a twinge of sympathy in my chest. “I bet most of us feel that way. They wanted to push us to those limits.”
“Yeah, but still…” She tugged at her bangs. “Sometimes I feel like I deserve to be here instead of at the college. Like I’m doing a kind of penance. Running missions isn’t even so bad if I think about how the lives I might be saving balance out the people I hurt. But if I’m wrecking the magic while I’m saving them, how does that solve anything? I’d rather be a part of saving it too, is all I’m saying.”
Hearing those words didn’t fix even half of my problem, but they were more than I’d had a few minutes ago. I was about to thank her for at least trying to believe me when our mission leader’s voice crackled out of our earpieces.
“There’s a car approaching from the east. Looks like the right one. All operatives prepare for engagement.”
Joselin and I leaned forward automatically. We had no room left for conversation, for anything other than the job ahead of us. I braced my hands against my knees and drew the lyric I’d practiced onto my tongue.
The plan we’d discussed in our briefing was to pierce through the protective magical barrier around the house in one swift blow and get in there before the inhabitants had a chance to heave us back. The team on the ground would grab the woman in the car. The four of us—me and Joselin on this side and Brandt and Leonie on the other—had to find and capture the guy inside. We weren’t totally sure how many other mages he might have around to guard him.
“And… engage!” the mission leader called.
Tires screeched on the road beyond our view. I twisted my tongue around the lyric, gathering the magic around my intent as the words tumbled out.
I had to break something to fulfill my role in this mission, but I’d made my casting as nonviolent as I could. My awareness stretched toward the thrum of the barrier in front of me, and I yanked at a piece of it with a lift of my voice, imagining that fragment was a stray thread in a massive woven structure. Not smashing it, just unraveling it.
Joselin spat out her casting at the same time. The energy in the air shuddered and released. I trained my attention on the window I’d been eyeing and sang out another verse to transport me from the roof to the room beyond that pane.
With a lurch and a flash of darkness, I was landed in a shadowed study. A crisp birch-wood scent laced the air from the bookshelves and desk I could barely make out. My arms had jerked up defensively, and another lyric was poised on my tongue, but I was the only one in the room.
Shouts were already carrying from somewhere deeper in the house. I dashed for the closed door. A thump and a groan radiated through the wall, and the magic flinched against my skin.
Brandt’s voice blared through my earpiece. “We’ve got him! Target down and secure. Two guards subdued.”
Dead, I was sure he meant, as the magic seized my shoulders with what felt like fingers digging straight into my muscles. My awareness of it had gotten even stronger since I’d opened myself up to it so freely the other night. I can’t do anything about him, I thought at it, but the bottom dropped out of my stomach anyway.
And yet, at the same time, some of the tightness in my chest faded. I hadn’t needed to make a choice. Part of me was glad Brandt had killed those guards so that it hadn’t come down to me. Dios mío, how selfish was I?
“Bring him in,” the mission leader said. “Lopez, Stravos, now that the barrier is down, I’m detecting a ’chanted object with a lot of power somewhere on the third floor. Locate it and report back.”
I drew my back straight where I’d stopped by the door. The mission wasn’t over yet.
At the quick casting I murmured, the magic quavered around me and offered up a condensed hum from close by on my right. The ’chanted object was here in the study with me. Over… there.
Joselin burst into the room as I yanked open the deep lower drawer on the desk. She must have done a scan of her own.
“I found it,” I said into my mic, clicking on my flashlight to peer at the knobby metallic device inside the drawer. The energy roiling off it sent a tendril of queasiness through me. I recognized the shape of the thing from training. “It’s one of those disorientation devices. Not activated.”
The pattern of bends in the metal bits that were soldered together amplified the ’chantment cast on the device. If set off, it’d release a blast of energy that would hit everyone in range with the equivalent of an emergency-grade migraine. Give it a minute, and you’d start bleeding from your ears.
“There could be a long-distance activation point anywhere,” the mission leader said. “Demolish and move out.”
The magic tremored at his words. I swallowed hard. Joselin stood still, watching to see what I would do.
The safe thing would be to burn the device up with one quick casting. No one could fault me for that. That was what my mission leader had meant. What most of the operatives would’ve done.
Follow my orders. Keep everyone depending on me safe. Cripple the magic a little more.
The magic that was clinging to me right now like a hysterical child.
I closed my eyes for a second, and a memory of my brother swam up unbidden—sitting on the floor together in our bedroom, Javi beaming with awe and pride at some new casting I’d eagerly demonstrated for him.
You are going to be a marvel, Ro. I can’t wait to see you put all those Confed pendejos to shame.
He’d never gotten to see me dazzle anyone. He’d died trying to win a future full of magic for me.
What had it all been for? The sacrifice he’d made—the pain I’d put my parents through, that they’d borne in the name of my happiness—the lives I’d taken and the people I’d failed to save in the Exam—what had any of it been for if I helped destroy the thing I’d fought so hard to keep?
The only one I’d put to shame was myself.
I might be just one mage, but I was a mage to be reckoned with. I owed it to them and to the magic not to give up.
I looked at Joselin, my hands clenching. She gave me a small smile. The resolve I’d found expanded through my chest with a blazing glow.
“I can detach the ’chantment in less than a minute and then smash the device,” I said. “That’s demolishing.”
A conspiratorial glint lit in my squad-mate’s eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “Of course it is. I want to see this.”
She stepped closer as I bent over the drawer. I didn’t want to risk even touching this thing. I trained my atten
tion on the strands of the casting in the device, the caustic melody designed to scatter people’s thoughts and shred their nerves. The verse I brought to my lips to test against it was soft and soothing. Where was the trigger point?
I hearkened a spot like a deeper pulse amid the tangled notes. With a shift in the pitch of my voice, I teased the magic I was conducting around the trigger. Pluck a strand free here with a hitching rhythm; loosen another one there with a quavering dip. The process was a more delicate, more precise unraveling.
Sweat trickled down my back even though the room was cool. I called one last thread of the ’chantment away, and the rest disintegrated with a ripple through the air. Joselin let out her breath. The magic around us calmed.
I scooped up the now-vacant device and tossed it on the floor. “Want to do the honors?”
Joselin grinned and stomped down her heel. The contraption burst apart with a chatter of metal bits.
My legs wobbled under me as we made for the ground floor, but the shakiness felt weirdly euphoric, as if my upper body wasn’t totally connected to my lower half. I’d been warned and threatened, I’d defied the Confed’s authorities anyway, and here I was, still standing.
“Lopez and I are heading out,” Joselin said into her mic. We hustled to the front door our squad-mates had left open, toward the whir of the helicopter our pilot had brought around.
We were just bounding down the front steps when a figure flew at Joselin, seemingly from out of nowhere.
It was a woman, stringy-limbed, with pale, tangled hair. A conjured shard of glowing light gleamed in one of her thin hands—a makeshift weapon. It couldn’t have been a carefully planned assault, only a moment of desperate opportunity. A short phrase I couldn’t translate wrenched from her mouth in a cry.
Joselin’s hands shot up with the instincts hammered into us in training. The words Hamlin had made me drill into my head during my own practice sessions sprang to my lips. Joselin was sputtering out her own hasty casting at the same time.
Hers struck the woman in the middle of the chest with a searing hiss. The conjured weapon nicked my squad-mate’s throat as the woman crumpled. My casting, an instant later, only clipped her shoulder now that she was failing. I’d been aiming at her heart.
The magic tore at my arms. The woman slumped lifeless on the ground. Joselin inhaled with a shudder and rubbed her elbows, fear still stark in her eyes. She glanced back at me, and her expression tensed.
“Good reflexes, Stravos,” our mission leader said in our ears. “Now get over here before any more crazies come out of the woodwork.”
My heart was racing as if I’d been the one almost assaulted. The magic’s frantic energy kept nipping at my skin. I’m sorry, I thought at it. I’m so sorry.
But what else could we have done? Sam had said it all the way back during my first mission: Locks can be fixed. Lots of other things can’t. Like Joselin’s life. With all the skill I had, I wasn’t sure I could’ve cast anything that would have deflected that attack in time while sparing her attacker.
I could champion the magic all I wanted, but as long as we were out here, we were soldiers too.
Bile filled my throat, but I managed to nod to Joselin. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
The tension left her face. We loped the rest of the way to the helicopter together. I dropped into my seat still feeling sick, not sure whether today had been more of a victory or a defeat.
I had to work better, work faster. So much and so many depended on me. I wouldn’t let them down.
Chapter Sixteen
Finn
Where was the line between courage and cowardice? I must have toed it many times in the last few months, but I still couldn’t determine the answer.
Was I bold for risking even more of my parents’ disappointment by stealing some of Dad’s confidential work information to help the League with our protest—or was I pathetic because I’d made sure I stayed invisible during that protest, staked out in a hotel room overlooking the crowd we’d assembled? I’d like to think it was more the former than the latter, but the niggling sensation in my gut wasn’t so sure.
“How’re things looking from the west side?” Tamara asked through the phone I had pressed to my ear. She’d found an observation point across and farther down the street from mine.
“As far as I can tell, everything’s going smoothly,” I said. The five hundred or so people who’d come out to rally were now swarming around the cars that had been carrying the international mage representatives to the conference center. I’d been able to tell everyone when to gather and where to wait, thanks to the documents on Dad’s work laptop that I’d snuck a peek at.
We’d been holding our ground for nearly an hour. The crowd was mostly still, waving posters we’d spent our last meeting writing up and shouting requests for fair treatment. Luis and a couple of his close colleagues circulated through the mass of figures. He’d just interrupted a couple of guys who’d started to pound on one of the cars.
We’re doing this as much to grab international attention as the Confed’s, he’d said at our last meeting. Those representatives need to see the Confed is committing violence against us, not the other way around. The consensus had been to keep this gathering immovable but peaceful.
Not all of us had been enthusiastic about that decision. “I think we can step this up a notch,” Ary said, the third voice in our conference call. She was stationed in a fifth-floor restaurant by the north end of the street, though I suspected she’d rather have been down in the crowd yelling at the cars than observing. She just didn’t want Tamara and me to be the only ones advising Luis.
Luis, the fourth and final voice, had to holler for us to hear him over the racket around him on the ground. “I don’t see any need to push harder when we’re accomplishing our goals. We’re making our point here. And if we hold back a little now, we’ll have more chance of surprising the Confed next time.”
“Hey, it looks like there might be a few people on the verge of a fight over at the southeast edge of the crowd,” I said, frowning. It was difficult to make out a lot of detail from my seventh-floor room, but a couple of our protesters had turned away from the main mass of bodies to talk to some of the spectators who’d stopped around the fringes. From the way one girl was jabbing her hand, it didn’t look like a friendly conversation.
“On it,” Luis said. He must have made a gesture, because Mark, easy to identify from his blue hair, broke from the crowd and loped over. My frown fell away as I watched him ease into the argument and redirect our people back to the protest.
In my memories from the Exam, he hadn’t been much of a peacemaker. Perhaps the League had inspired him to find a new calling.
“We can’t get complacent,” Ary said. “The Confed’s not just going to sit back and take this. We’d better be prepared for whatever they try next.”
The security people inside the cars had already made a couple of attempts to open up the blockade around them, but we’d been ready to deflect both. Dad’s plan for the conference arrivals had included a list of defensive protocols—ones I imagined had been worked out in case of a possible terrorist threat, not in anticipation of any local demonstration.
A number of Dull police officers had turned up as well, but they’d hung back around the edges of the crowd. I suspected they were hesitant to get involved in a conflict where magic could come into play. For the most part, the Dull authorities saw it as the Confed’s responsibility to police its own, which was a policy our authorities generally encouraged.
“The Circle will have called in the Confed’s primary security force, I’m sure,” Tamara said. “We’ll just have to watch what tactics they decide to take when they get involved.”
“Weren’t you supposed to have all the inside intel to get us through this, Finn?” Ary said, a hint of snark creeping into her voice.
I didn’t let myself bristle. There’d been a little contention over the fact that I hadn’t revealed the source o
f my information or given the files over to anyone else to look through—I might be willing to use Dad’s position to help the League, but I intended to stay in control of how far we used it—and that was fair enough. Luis and the others had taken my advisement into account, which was all that mattered.
“I know they’ll call in Security,” I said. “That’s common sense. The specific tactics, they can’t have planned in advance. They had no reason to anticipate this situation.”
“The Confed hasn’t needed to deal with any large-scale disruptions since before you three were born, I bet,” Tamara said. “This will be interesting.”
My gaze lingered on the dark sedans that held our international visitors. What were they making of this protest? Some of them came from national mage organizations that were more lenient than the Confed, but others had even stricter Dampering policies than ours.
“Hey!” Ary said. “There’s movement heading this way at my end. A bunch of cars and some people on foot—definitely security types.”
I peered to the north, my pulse thumping faster. Our first clash with the Confed’s security force could be the deciding factor in the protest’s success.
In a moment, the cars and a few lines of jogging figures came into my view. They paused several feet from the nearest spectators. More security officers spilled out of the cars, several of them motioning for the spectators to move out of the way.
It’d taken them a while to remove us from the College, but we’d been able to put walls at our backs there, and we’d only had small areas to guard. Here, if they managed to break even a slight gap through the mass of bodies below, the whole blockade would fall apart.
I studied the officers’ movements as they assembled at the edge of the crowd.
“Stand steady!” Luis was calling to the protesters. “Be ready to link up like we did before.”
The mouths of the security officers started to move. They raised their arms, ready to make a sweeping motion, a pose that jarred me with recognition.