Ruthless Magic

by Megan Crewe

  On the other hand, maybe the food wasn’t. No one had mentioned a ’chantment that could affect what we ate—Judith had said hers was meant to simply shut out the use of magic, not even to hurt us—but that didn’t mean the examiners couldn’t add their own tricks to the mix.

  I stopped at the table. The smell of fresh bread filled my mouth with saliva.

  Lacey grabbed one of the sandwiches.

  “Stop!” I said.

  She hesitated with it halfway to her mouth. “What?”

  Suddenly I wasn’t sure what to say. The examiners were probably watching our progress, weren’t they? I had to be careful how I talked about them.

  Before I could decide on the exact words to express my worry, Finn said, “We should treat everything in this place as a possible test, so check before you bite! Simple enough.”

  He sounded so cheerful in spite of everything that I felt myself relax. He’d understood my fear and taken it in stride, and now all the others were murmuring probing castings over their chosen meals as if that were a standard precaution.

  I picked up a sandwich, and Finn tipped his head to me with that smile of his. Yesterday’s flutter returned to my chest, headier than before. I tugged my gaze away. Getting caught up in that feeling in the middle of this Exam could be as dangerous as any ’chantment.

  Judith dug in to her ham-and-cheese. She swallowed and sighed happily. “I was starting to worry they’d totally abandoned us.”

  I couldn’t stop my eyebrows from rising. “We have no idea how much they’re even paying attention to what happens in here,” I had to point out. “We just spent the whole morning avoiding being ripped apart by conjured monsters, and the ’chantment before that broke your arm.” The examiners don’t give a damn about us.

  “I guess it could be worse.” Lacey wiped crumbs from her mouth. “The whole point is to test us. They’ve got to get intense to really stretch our abilities, right? At least we get a second chance. They could just Damper us, and that’d be the end of it.”

  Finn shrugged. “Or they could not Damper anyone.”

  He said it as casually as he usually spoke, but Prisha stiffened. My gaze fixed on him again. He seemed oblivious to us as he directed a probing ’chantment at his roast beef.

  Maybe it was easier to say those kinds of things when you were old magic and didn’t have to face the same scrutiny.

  Desmond cocked his head. “Are there places like that? Where all mages are allowed to keep their full abilities?”

  “Dampering was standard policy in all of the countries my family was stationed in,” Judith said. “Some places do it younger. My mom grew up in China, and her brother was Dampered when he was ten. It’s always been like that, right? To protect us from the Dulls.”

  “Yeah,” I said, remembering the tutorial classes where we’d briefly covered magical history. I could give a show of following the party line. “At least, that was the theory when we were staying hidden, to make sure the only people who had full use of magic were disciplined enough to control it. Get too lax about security, one person messes up in the wrong place, and you end up with the witch trials.”

  Lacey lowered her sandwich to her chest. “Then... there really isn’t a reason to do it anymore, is there?”

  ¡Ay, no! I hadn’t meant to prompt that question, at least not consciously. “They’re concerned about... different things now,” I said, hoping to deflect her.

  “Technically it’s the same thing,” Finn said. “Avoiding conflict with the Dulls. To be fair, the worry isn’t totally unreasonable. It’s not as if magicless people stopped being nervous about us after we confirmed we existed, and even a small slip can do a lot of damage. My grandfather was killed in a riot that started after someone accidentally singed a couple of Dulls with an illusion.”

  “It’s two birds with one stone,” Prisha said. “Make the Dull hoi polloi feel better knowing the Confed’s keeping control over its own, and prevent the older mages from getting careless, because their kids will be judged in part by family history. It’s smart, really.”

  She smiled but so thinly I couldn’t tell whether she actually admired that approach or found it as disturbing as I did.

  The Confed used Dampering for more than that, I thought but didn’t say. If Mom was right—if the Confed Dampered not just the weaker mages but anyone powerful who hadn’t been raised on Confed ideology—then they were keeping their own authority safe too. There would never be a group of potential dissidents with enough power to challenge them.

  “It makes sense that they have to restrict it,” Judith said. “I mean, no one really understands exactly what magic is or how it works. What if tons more people started doing crazy things with it, and the government couldn’t stop them? Who knows what would happen?”

  “We understand it enough to know it follows natural rules,” Desmond said. “Anyway, magic is just what we call things we don’t have a scientific explanation for yet. You know, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ I bet—”

  A thud sounded in the distance. Finn’s hand dropped to his pocket, the same gesture I’d seen him make earlier this morning. It was the pocket on his right hip, it occurred to me—where he’d tensed when Prisha had touched him last night.

  A memory from five years ago clicked into place: Javier acting edgy, me confronting him, and him pulling a small switchblade from his jeans. What do you have that for? I’d demanded.

  He’d shrugged, looking unexpectedly ashamed. It’s just in case. Just for show. Some of the guys in the neighborhood were hassling me. I’m not going to have to use it, Ro, te doy mi palabra.

  Finn was carrying something like that. Something that made him nervous. Something he thought could cause harm.

  I was just opening my mouth to call him on it when the ground pitched beneath us. I stumbled forward—not into the table that had been there a moment ago but into a hard translucent wall that looked as if it were made out of solidified fog.

  Chapter Nine

  Finn

  No matter what you’re feeling, put on a pleasant face, and you can conquer the world. My mother was fond of giving that advice, and until about five hours ago, I’d considered it sound. Unfortunately, I was discovering several exceptions to her rule. Giant shadowy wolves, for example, were not remotely mollified by friendly banter. Smiling winningly at the strange walls that had shot up around me didn’t budge them one bit.

  The walls had cut me off from the rest of the group. I tapped the cool surface of the one directly in front of me. It looked like fogged glass—a mottled, pallid gray and faintly translucent—but it was flexible to the touch.

  An off-key arpeggio thrummed in the air, setting my pulse out of kilter. The magic was reacting to something—reacting badly. I rubbed my thumb over my fingers, frowned, and murmured a quick testing line. My voice faded without the slightest hitch in the energy around me.

  I sang another line. The energy still didn’t stir. My chest tightened. Trying to cast was like groping after a coin submerged in water. I wasn’t reaching the magic at all.

  I swiped my hand over my face, fighting the cold surge of panic rising through me. We weren’t just physically imprisoned; we were cut off from the world as surely as if we’d been sent to Tartarus.

  This had to be Judith’s ’chantment. She’d said it would stop us from casting.

  On the other side of the wall to my left, Prisha muttered a string of curses. I closed my eyes. My headache was merely a faint thudding now. I’d managed to avoid casting during our entire marble search. I could stay calm.

  If I couldn’t help with magic or without, I truly was useless.

  “Is everyone all right?” I called out. “Beyond being trapped in a magical blackout box, I mean?”

  “As if that isn’t bad enough,” Prisha remarked flatly.

  “I’m alive,” Desmond said.

  “My arm—” Judith began in a rasp, and halted. “Never mind. I’m sorry about
this.”

  “I hate this,” Lacey said. “The way it feels...”

  “I can’t cast anything at all,” Rocío said at my right. Her voice was oddly stiff. “Judith, did you put a countermeasure on the ’chantment, like Finn’s symbol for his?”

  She’d dodged my question about whether she was all right. Desmond had cast a numbing ’chantment on her wounds, and he’d helped Judith too, but if this trap had fragmented not just our connection to the magic but ’chantments in process, both of them would be feeling the full pain of their injuries. And after the mauling Rocío had taken from that wolf...

  “No,” Judith replied. “I had a hard enough time coming up with the idea in the first place. I’d only just finished the casting when our time was up. Maybe if we’d had more time, I’d have thought of it...” She sucked in a sharp breath. “So I guess this is what it’s like being burned out.”

  That idea only sent my panic spiking higher. “Then let’s make sure this is the only time we experience it,” I said quickly. “Do we need to worry about anything else? Being crushed or stabbed with spikes or fun additions like that?”

  Desmond managed to guffaw.

  “It’s just this,” Judith said. “But I don’t know how we get out of it.”

  “There’s got to be a way.” Unfortunately, everything I’d read about untangling ’chantments required more magic.

  There was no use in dwelling on that. Whatever the case, you always started from the same point. To tackle someone else’s casting, you had to trace it down to the core of their intent.

  “It’s an interesting idea, anyway,” I went on. “I bet the examiners were impressed. What made you think of it?”

  “I don’t know,” Judith said. “I went in a few other directions, but they all seemed too obvious. Then I remembered hearing some foreign security people talking at one of my dad’s business parties last year—about how they could keep magic out of rooms they wanted to protect or stop criminals from casting during interrogations or whatever.”

  Desmond let out a low whistle. “So you’ve got some swanky government technique going on here.”

  “I doubt I cast it the same way they would have,” Judith said, but she sounded a little less despondent. “They didn’t go into detail, but I heard enough to figure out it has to do with the frequencies—you have to make the magic oscillate in a way that scatters any attempt at casting. So I focused on that. Mostly I was thinking of the awful music my brother listens to.”

  I rested my palm on the wall in front of me. The discomforting thrum penetrated me more deeply, but I held myself still, absorbing it. The magic in the walls was moving at a particular rhythm, then—a rhythm so unnaturally erratic it was disrupting all the energy around us, preventing us from molding it.

  If an erratic rhythm could shatter our castings... couldn’t the same thing break Judith’s? Her attempt could scarcely be as stable as that of a government professional.

  “What if we could scatter the scattering ’chantment?” I said. “If we produce a frequency that disrupts the magic forming the walls, we should at least weaken them, right?”

  “Except we can’t cast,” Prisha said.

  “No,” Desmond said, “but you don’t need magic to make a rhythm.”

  “We hit the walls,” Rocío said. “The ’chantment can’t stop us from affecting it directly.”

  “Precisely,” I said. “I guess... It’s all one ’chantment. So if we all come up with different rhythms—something fast and complicated?—and drum them out at the same time... It’ll be a cacophony, but maybe that’ll be enough to break the ’chantment apart.”

  “That might work,” Judith said slowly.

  “It can’t hurt to try,” Prisha agreed.

  There was a pause. They were waiting on me. My voice caught in my throat. What if trying did hurt? What if my strategy not only failed but provoked a negative reaction?

  A warbling sound drifted through the walls. The hiss and crackle of it tugged on my memory. My Grandma Lockwood had that old transistor radio she used to turn on and tune when we’d visit.

  I’d heard that static hiss when my ’chantment had acted on us before. We’d fended off the effect, but we hadn’t destroyed it. The examiners must have amplified the radio for us to hear it now. Of course, as long as we had the nullifying symbol still on us, we should be fine—

  “Rocío,” Desmond said quietly, “when we get out of this, I’ll need you to fix my hand right away.”

  He’d needed his symbol ’chanted for him to see it. That magic would have been shattered too. I clenched my hands.

  “One, two, three… go!” Prisha said ahead of me.

  Maybe because of Judith’s remark about her brother, my mind shot to Margo’s favorite band: the screeching guitars and stuttering drums that had filtered into my bedroom from hers years ago. I thrust my hands at the wall, beating out the frenetic melody to the best of my recollection. All around me, the air shuddered with the strikes of my companions’ fists.

  The impact jolting through my palms was exhilarating—so much better than swiping at shadows. I struck out harder, faster, humming along with the beat.

  As the song I remembered wound toward its finale, the wall felt no less solid. “More!” I shouted, resisting the whisper of doubt. “Give it all you’ve got.”

  I dredged another discordant song from my memory. A tremor raced through the air, and I thought I might have felt it in the wall too. I threw myself into the seesawing melody of the chorus as fast as my fists could fly. The translucent surface in front of me flexed and swayed. More, more, more—

  With a crinkling sound like crushed aluminum foil, the walls fell in on themselves and toppled into the dull gray ground. The whisper of magic steadied around me. I’d have hugged it in my relief if I could.

  A few feet ahead of me, Desmond whipped around to glare at Prisha. He lunged at her, but before I could so much as move, Rocío had dashed past me to grab his wrist mid-swing. The bottom of her torn shirt flapped, revealing the smooth brown skin at her waist, and my pulse hitched with a sensation that was very different from relief.

  With a few soft words, she set the heart-and-square symbol glowing bright on the back of Desmond’s hand.

  He let out a rush of breath. “Sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Rocío said.

  No, technically it was mine.

  Judith braced her makeshift sling against her chest. “All right,” she said. “We did it.”

  My radio’s static carried on through the air. Had it gotten even louder since I’d first noticed it?

  The sound was distant enough that I couldn’t determine precisely which direction the radio lay in. If the examiners amplified the ’chantment more, I wasn’t certain my safeguard would hold. I’d been exhausted when I’d cast that coda.

  A chilly prickle ran down my back. “I have to find my ’chantment and break it,” I said. “As long as it’s still broadcasting, the examiners can use it against us. You all keep heading for shelter. I’ll catch up with you before you miss me.”

  It felt so natural to speak of them like that now: as the enemy. They’d made themselves the enemy when they’d abandoned us to be maimed and tormented in this vast test without a hint of support or even supervision.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea for any of us to go off alone,” Rocío said.

  “She’s right.” Prisha gave me a searching look.

  My gut knotted. She was speculating about how drained I was, whether I’d need another of her numbing ’chantments for my head and whether I’d be able to extinguish my own ’chantment without her help.

  I’d relied on her more than was fair already. I would not let her exhaust her magic to compensate for my weakness. “We haven’t faced your storm yet. You need to get everyone to one of the buildings—you said that’d be enough of a defense while we wait it out, right? I’ll take care of this and be back in a jiff.”

  “You have to take someone,
” Prisha protested.

  “You’re the one who knows your ’chantment best. You need to be focused on that.”

  “So I’ll go with you.” Rocío’s tense gaze slid from me to the others. “But we should get moving.”

  A worried shadow had crossed her face, but I could tell she wasn’t afraid of what might happen to her without the safety of numbers. She was afraid of what might happen to the others without her.

  Evidently, she’d decided I needed protection more than they did. Had I already shown my talents to be that feeble?

  “Right,” I said, suppressing my embarrassment.

  “Finn.” Prisha grabbed my elbow and dragged me to the side with an abruptness that startled me. She lowered her voice. “I’ll come. You don’t need to take her. Let’s just get this over with.”

  “I’m pretty sure Rocío can manage to protect me should the need arise,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Prisha muttered. “Maybe not. You came here for me, didn’t you? So let me do this for you.”

  Hadn’t she seen what Rocío was capable of? Her concern defied logic. The chaos of the Exam must be wearing on her. It was wearing on all of us.

  “I came here for me,” I said quietly but firmly, and motioned to her shoulder. “And you’ve already been hurt in part because of my wretched ’chantment. I’ll concentrate better on disabling it if I know you’re safe. Please?”

  Her expression softened. “All right. But you’d better be back fast.”

  I gave her an obedient salute and turned back to Rocío. The hiss of static beckoned me. “Let’s go.”

  As we set off, I tilted my head for a sharper read on the sound. The wind whistled past us, distorting the crackle. I turned the other way, toward Rocío, and registered the tightening of her mouth as she touched her back where the wolf had ripped into her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Hold on just a few seconds?”

  Desmond had sealed her skin so no blood seeped out into the torn strip of sheet she’d wrapped around her chest, but the lacerated flesh underneath must be total agony. Hades take me—she’d seemed so calm I’d almost forgotten the numbing ’chantments had worn off.