by Megan Crewe
That seemed a decent length of time. I ambled closer to the wall with the photographs. My gaze tripped over images of violent terrorism: a town burning in a teal-tinged blaze of magic, a passenger train crumpled where it had been blasted off its tracks, and bodies struck by sniper bullets scattered in a city square.
I felt my spine drawing straighter. This was why the magical community had come forward: to defend the rest of the country. Of course the examiners would want to assess our ability to prevent this sort of carnage. If I did one meaningful thing in my entire life, I’d want it to be that.
It wasn’t enough to merely pass this test; I had to ace it.
“Ah, I remember that bombing,” Callum remarked, coming up behind me.
I stared at him, but he didn’t look away from the picture of the crumpled train.
“London,” he said. “They figured the Russians were behind it but no way to prove it. Totally vicious.”
He wasn’t technically talking to me, only to himself. My hand balled at my side. He’d heard the rule, and naturally his first thought was how he could dupe someone else into breaking it.
I crossed the room to the cluttered shelving unit. Some of the objects scattered on it fit the established theme: a grenade, a pistol, a wooden shield, a warrior’s helm that looked vaguely Viking. Others struck me as rather mundane. What use would we make of a fork or a pair of glasses?
Before I settled on an object for my ’chantment, I needed to invent the terrible “foe” it would confront. I found myself picturing dragons and sea serpents.
The girl with the sunburst necklace halted by the next shelf and reached for a woolen scarf. She was going to defend the nation with that?
Of course, any item could be imbued with intent. The examiners must have given us this wide selection for a reason. Not every opponent would be best challenged with an obvious weapon.
Our true enemies weren’t conjured creatures but the human mages who would wield magic against us, or Dull militants with their penchant for destruction. They were the ones I should target: the people—the sort willing to set off a bomb on a crowded train, to die if it meant taking more of us down with them.
They were dying for someone: for the dogmatic organizations behind them, for the hatred those groups stirred up against everyone who held different views. I could work with that.
My eyes caught on an old-fashioned radio, only a little larger than my hand. Yes. Coordinating the function of the object with the purpose of the ’chantment would make focusing the casting easier. I scooped it up and headed for one of the tables.
Resting the radio on the polished surface, I closed my eyes and absorbed the lines and ridges of the metal shell against my fingers. One of my few real skills with magic had always been getting it to stick once applied; the tricky part was ensuring the ’chantment did what I intended it to. This idea was going to require a layered casting, one element on top of another, refining as I went to conduct all the components into a harmonious symphony.
I could do this. If I had to use the full four hours, what of it?
Militants controlled their followers through belief and loyalty, so I’d create disbelief and distrust first.
I settled on a few lines about betrayal from a Roman play. The magic in the room was trembling at a slightly erratic frequency, pulled in so many directions at once. As it quivered over me, I pictured shadowy figures on a barbaric mission. Then I rolled the words off my tongue, one after the next, directing the energy from the air into the radio.
When I let my voice fall, the sizzle of ’chanted uncertainty tingled against my hands. I set the radio down and leaned against the tabletop to regain my breath. The pressure in my forehead was sharpening into a dagger.
The first movement was done.
The waifish girl in the overlarge dress hunched over the table ahead of mine. The thin whisper of her voice carried to me: “You have to do this. You can’t go back. You can’t.”
Her desperation echoed mine far too closely. I straightened up.
Callum stalked between the tables at my right, jabbing his elbow toward a boy who was constructing a tower out of wooden blocks. The blocks clattered across the table, and the boy whirled. “What the hell are you doing? You—”
An examiner appeared at his side. “But I— But he—” the boy protested.
The examiner said something to him sotto voce as she guided him to the doorway. His face crumpled.
I gave myself the momentary pleasure of imagining socking Callum’s smirk off his face and made a mental note to keep my possessions close. He wandered back over to the table he was sharing with Judith, an amiable girl who’d been with the Seattle Academy novices I’d met this morning. She was frowning at the toy car she’d selected while one hand fidgeted with her purse’s spiral pattern of silver beads.
Callum veered to the side at the last second. He banged Judith’s shoulder with enough force that she knocked the car to the edge of the table. Her head jerked up, her mouth tightening, but she kept her silence.
At least someone here was wise to his tricks.
I laid my hands on the radio. Stirring up uncertainty wouldn’t be a powerful enough defense. To impress the examiners, I had to show I could turn the enemy fully against their own cause. I could provoke paranoia so they’d imagine the worst of their leaders and colleagues, and a sense of urgency to intensify their reactions. Let them commit the violence they intended against each other instead of us.
I chose a lyric, braced myself, and began to weave the new strands of energy into the tremor of magic already intertwined with the radio. Each connection needed to be strengthened, like notes transformed into chords.
One thread of the magic diminished as I sang it forward. I raised my voice, straining to recapture it, and pain spiked through my bones. The thread darted away.
Damn it. I reached out with my voice, ignoring the swell of discomfort all through my body. Stretching the syllables long and cautiously, I inched the ’chantment into place and tested each vibration of magic until I was sure the entire structure was sound. I’d finally finished, with a rough exhalation and a shudder, when Callum started talking again.
“Well, that’s not going to work,” he announced to everyone and no one in particular. “Let me see...”
Judith glared at him. When he fell silent, she lowered her head to intone a verse, but she’d scarcely begun when he interrupted again.
“Yes, that’s it,” he said in the same belligerent manner. “Maybe if I put this piece with that one. Of course. Excellent.”
He was holding a Frisbee. I restrained myself from rolling my eyes. Thank Zeus he hadn’t started up earlier.
The strain of my last casting hadn’t yet eased. Bracing my hands against the table, I glanced over at Prisha. She’d ended up across from the girl with the sunburst necklace.
Prisha was murmuring a phrase to a bottle of clear liquid. She paused to scan the table, and her brow knit. After a moment, she stepped back to peer underneath.
The starburst-necklace girl raised her eyes from the scarf she was working on as Prisha swiveled to check under the neighboring tables. The girl watched for a few seconds and then smoothed her hands over the woven fabric. She tugged one corner of the scarf back.
The bottle’s lid was lying underneath. Without hesitation, the girl nudged it across the table to Prisha’s side and returned to her own casting.
At the rattle of the lid’s crossing, Prisha turned and made a muted exclamation. The girl didn’t look up. Prisha eyed her and then commented to herself, “I’m certainly glad this turned up.”
She must be getting tired too, to have been so careless. She was lucky she’d been working next to someone disinclined to take advantage and not, say, Callum.
I inspected my radio. Carelessness—I needed to avoid that too. We hadn’t talked a great deal about safeguards in class, because we hadn’t generally cast magic intended to have ongoing negative consequences, but the texts I’d studi
ed had expounded on the need for precautions. As soon as you worked a casting on an object, you no longer fully controlled it. With a ’chantment this potentially destructive, the examiners had to appreciate seeing every eventuality considered.
A symbol would do: something that friendly soldiers could wear. Hmmm. Faith protected… A heart in a square? Why not?
I’d have to finely modulate the sensitivity and harmonize it with every thread within the existing ’chantment. Casting this coda was going to be a beast. A splinter of a headache was still jabbing across my temple.
Judith strode past me. She placed her toy car, now stripped of wheels, on a table at the other end of the room and returned to the shelving unit.
Callum picked up one of the wheels she’d abandoned. As he rolled it between his knobby thumb and forefinger, he whispered a few singsong words under his breath. My body tensed.
Leaving his Frisbee, he strolled in the same direction Judith had gone. She was occupied with examining a box she’d retrieved from the shelves. Callum brushed past her new table and dropped the wheel he’d ’chanted into the toy car’s seat.
No one but me appeared to have noticed. I lowered my eyes as Callum ambled by. Hades knew what he’d cast the thing to do to her. It didn’t require much talent to cudgel someone if that was all that mattered to you. My mind leapt back to the courtyard, to the sprawled body and the blood.
Whatever scheme he was enacting, I needed all my remaining strength to complete my own ’chantment. I barely knew Judith. She’d never expect me to risk my chances for her.
Without intending to, I looked toward Prisha’s table again—toward the sunburst-charm girl who’d spoken up this morning. As if she sensed my thoughts, she raised her head. She held my gaze for a second, blinking, and then I yanked it away. A crisply searing sensation was crawling through my chest. Maybe it was only my fatigue, but it brought a suspicion I couldn’t shake: she’d know. If Judith came back to her table and something blew up in her face, the girl would know I could have stopped it and hadn’t.
Judith was turning from the shelves. My hands clenched around my radio. The idea was absurd; no one here could read minds. Even if she could have, it shouldn’t have mattered to me.
Yet it did. My feet were moving.
I strode toward Judith’s table. With a flick of my thumb, I extended the radio’s antenna to its full length. It could be a simple thing, a swing of my arm…
As I reached the table, I swerved to the side. The antenna caught on the car and sent the toy spinning off the table. A sound of protest broke from Judith’s throat as it hit the ground.
The ’chanted wheel popped out of the seat, careened across the floor, and smacked the wall just as Judith snatched my elbow. Then it burst with a bolt of electricity that erupted two feet in the air and thrummed through the floor to my shoes. The smell of ozone flooded my nose.
A cudgel indeed.
Judith gaped at the shattered wheel, and then at me. Before she forgot herself, I rubbed my mouth. She snapped hers shut.
I had to look at Callum then. He glowered at me with a sneer that turned my innards cold.
“I sure am clumsy today,” I remarked to myself. “Better get on with this task.”
Possibly I’d just hamstrung myself. Still, as I passed Prisha’s station, it wasn’t the arch of her eyebrows that drew my attention. It was the girl, bent over her scarf, with a little smile curving her thin lips.
Chapter Six
Rocío
The Exam room had no clocks, so we only knew our time was up when an examiner appeared in the doorway. He clapped his hands. “Finish.”
I stretched my arms and took a step back from my scarf. The rectangle of rough wool had fit my intent well enough that I’d only added minor tweaks in at least two hours, but I hadn’t exactly enjoyed the casting.
“Leave your work on the tables,” the examiner said.
My body resisted. I made myself fold the scarf and set it down. The magic reverberating through it sent a sense of constriction creeping up into my hands, amplifying that uneasy pressure. A monster of a ’chantment lurked inside the fabric, cold and horrifying.
Of course we had to leave our work for the mages to test. Considering what they’d asked of us, it’d be awfully dangerous for them to do that testing with us present. I didn’t actually want to see my ’chantment in action. But it felt somehow irresponsible to walk away from the scarf and the power I’d sent into it.
In the hall, four more mages in gray waited for us. They led us around a corner, down one flight of stairs, and up another, each space as whitewashed as the last. I guessed the flawless surfaces were supposed to give the impression of order and cleanliness. I found them unnerving. Every stretch of unblemished white yelled out how emphatically the Confed was trying to cover up the decades of prison grime and violence.
We came to a stop in another windowless hall, wide and dim enough to give it a cavernous feel. “You will be taken to your dorms now,” the first examiner said. “The thirty-five of you remaining have been divided into groups by last name.”
As he rattled off the first set, I stared at the novice mages around me. Thirty-five meant nearly half of us gone just one day into the Exam. I hadn’t seen Shaleigh since the courtyard.
The second group peeled off, heading to the left, and the third examiner, a large man with a dour, lumpy face, stepped forward. “Lockwood, Lopez, Mathur, Nilsson, Ornstein, Pan, Powell. Follow me.” He strode off to the right, and the seven of us fell in step behind.
The boy with the smile ended up a pace ahead of me, the girl with the hennaed hands beside him. He rolled his shoulders as he walked, and the muscles in his back flexed against the thin fabric of his shirt, which had obviously been tailored to fit his lanky frame perfectly.
I jerked my gaze away. This wasn’t the time or place for daydreaming. Still, I couldn’t help feeling a little pleased that, from what I’d seen today, his good-naturedness was more than just for show.
The rest of our group included the girl with the silver-beaded purse I’d seen on the bridge and Axton’s girlfriend, Lacey, her face sallow behind the fall of her mousy hair. I wouldn’t have expected her to make it this far based on my first impression, but she must have found strength somewhere inside that billow dress.
The guy with the mohawk tramped along next to her, his hands jammed in the pockets of his baggy jeans. The midnight-blue tint on the ’hawk carried through the speckling of buzzed hair on either side of his scalp. The last of us—a skinny Black guy whose T-shirt featured a faded print of a spaceship—I hadn’t noticed before.
The examiner motioned to a row of cubbies beside an open doorway. “Leave any bags or other extraneous belongings here. You’ll find what you need for the night inside.”
The others filed into the room, but the girl from the bridge hesitated. She clutched her purse. “I’d rather keep this with me.”
“Leave any bags here,” the examiner repeated without changing his inflection.
The girl let out a sharp breath. With a shake of her head that scattered her sleek black hair, she reached into the purse, drew out an item, and shoved it into a pocket in her chinos. She pushed the bag to the back of one of the cubbies and then headed through the doorway.
It was just me and the dour-faced examiner now. My legs locked. I hadn’t found the chance to ask anyone about Javi yet.
I swallowed my nervousness. “Sir,” I said, “I’ve wanted to ask: My brother took the Exam three years ago—Javier Lopez? He... didn’t come home. I don’t know if you were working here then or if there are records, but it would mean a lot to me to know how he died.”
The mage considered me. Maybe asking had been a breach of etiquette after all. Did he think I was trying to get a scoop on the later challenges? I was about to blurt out that if I couldn’t know until I’d finished the Exam, I’d accept that, when he opened his mouth.
“Javier Lopez,” he said in a cool voice. “Yes. I see the resemblan
ce.” He folded his arms over the expanse of his chest. “He wasn’t Champion material. I expect you’ll end up on the same path soon enough. He went down fighting—I’ll give him that—and I suppose you will too. It won’t make a difference. We cut the chaff from the wheat. You should have listened to your letter.”
He turned on his heel and stalked away without giving me a chance to respond. The chill in his tone seeped through my skin.
It won’t make a difference. You should have listened to your letter.
Was he saying they’d already decided my fate? Had they decided about Javi too, before he’d even started their tests? My stomach knotted. Mom hadn’t dared to speculate that far, but the examiner had made his implications pretty clear.
Maybe I’d misunderstood. I was still here, wasn’t I? They could have pulled me aside at any moment if they’d wanted to.
Unless they weren’t going to be content with a mere burning out.
I ventured into the white, windowless dorm room on unsteady feet. My sneakers squeaked on the polished linoleum. Behind me, the door slid shut automatically.
The others had gravitated to the two rows of cots that filled most of the room. The only one left was in the middle of the row beside the door I’d just walked through. Tan blankets, white sheets, everything spotlessly clean. Even the air smelled like over-starched laundry. The dorm was more hospital ward than prison, other than the wooden table at the far side of the room that held stacks of plates and cutlery.
The boy with the smile was sitting on the cot beside mine. The girl with the hennaed hands bent over him, her palm on his forehead. “…push yourself like that,” she was muttering.