by Megan Crewe
It didn’t respond, only wrapped itself more solidly around me. It was something… something in the magic that rejected what we’d done or were about to do?
A memory slipped through my head, as if drawn up by the magic’s grip: I was eight, in my grandparents’ living room. Abuelito had stumbled and bumped his elbow against Abuelita’s figurine of a man and woman dancing, the one she’d had since childhood and brought with her from Mexico. It had cracked into at least twenty pieces on the floor, and Abuelita’s expression had cracked in dismay along with it.
She’d looked so upset that even though she stiffened up whenever I cast in front of her, I’d dared to ask, Can I fix it? When she’d hesitantly nodded, I’d used one of her old songs to bring the shards swirling around each other in their own beautiful dance as they found their places and reconnected. I’d wanted her to see the music in the magic. And she had. She’d laughed and hugged me, and she’d never tensed again when I worked with magic in her presence.
That was what casting was supposed to be like—what felt right to me. What we were doing here, smashing through these things, was the opposite of that. Was my discomfort making the magic behave oddly?
“Come on,” Prisha said in my silence. “The examiners said to be fast. We’ve got to get going.”
I didn’t know how to explain the sensation stopping me. The presence was loosening—still with me, still clinging but less forcefully. A false alarm? A problem averted? One more trick from the examiners’ sleeves? The tenor of the magic didn’t feel directed by outside intent, but I’d never felt anything like that presence before to compare.
We didn’t have time for me to puzzle the problem out. I shook my head. “Never mind.”
No other sentries had emerged outside the building. Prisha set off toward the building’s door, and the rest of us ran at her heels. Our heads jerked this way and that as we scanned for any threat, but nothing came at us.
Prisha reached the door and pushed it. When it didn’t budge, she muttered something at it, and the lock clicked. She nudged it open gingerly. A long dark hallway stretched out on the other side.
The interior was the same impenetrable black as the outside but without the glossy shine. The inner walls seemed to absorb the light that slipped through the open door before it traveled more than a few feet inside. Staring into the space made me dizzy, as if my mind were slightly removed from my body—as if I were there and yet not.
“I don’t like this place,” Judith said. “It feels... weird.”
“Well, the point of the Exam isn’t to make us comfortable,” Prisha said. “I don’t see any sentries in there, at least.”
“Not yet,” Mark said grimly.
We eased inside onto the harder floor, staying close. The presence in the magic continued nagging at me with little tweaks of my skin. The actual air around me lay still, not a draft or a shift in pressure as we moved, as if it weren’t air at all. As if it were nothing. Our feet barely made a sound against the hard floor. I shivered, keeping my lyric ready.
“I’ll cast a search charm,” Desmond said. “I’ve got some practice at those. I’ll target it to any strong weaving of magic.”
There was a strange muffled quality to his voice, as if he were speaking through a thick scarf. Something about the walls—did they absorb sound the way they did light?
He stepped a little ahead of us and rolled out a short verse. The hum of magic twisted in my ears. We stood still, waiting for him to say when the casting had hit its mark.
He was just turning back toward us when two sentries burst straight through the wall in front of him.
My shattering spell burst from my lips automatically. I slashed out with my hand, hurtling lances of magic toward both. The energy in the air clenched and surged, and the sentries exploded into bursts of pebbles.
The presence wrenched at me. I coughed, fighting the urge to wheeze. My elbows twinged with the aftershock of the casting.
Desmond had ducked low. He straightened up with a sharp exhale. His gaze found my face without quite meeting my eyes. “Thanks,” he said.
A hand grasped my shoulder—Finn. The others were staring at me.
“Nice casting,” Prisha said, her voice similarly muffled. “Two of them, just like that.” She snapped her fingers. Her tone had sounded impressed, but I saw something wary in the set of her mouth.
Judith rubbed her arms. “Do you think those ones alerted any others?”
I swallowed hard. “I guess we’ll find out.”
“I definitely don’t think I should try that again,” Desmond said. “It’s like the casting drew them. But I did get a sense… There’s something upstairs, to the right. We should hearken it when we get close enough, if we get there before my ’chantment wears off. I didn’t have time to make it really stick.”
“Upstairs?” Lacey said, peering around us.
I couldn’t make out any doorways in the walls, not even a bend in the hall. Although... had the sentries come through the wall or had it just looked that way?
I stepped closer to the wall just past Desmond. My reaching hand sank into the black surface as if it were nothing but mist. A cool tingle ran over my fingers. I tensed, ready to defend myself, and walked right into the wall.
An empty black room spilled out into my vision on the other side, lit hazily by a small window.
Mark poked his head in after me. “Now that is creepy.”
“I’ll check in here,” I said. “Maybe the rest of you could see if there are any other rooms?”
I felt along the walls until I’d circled the whole space but found no other opening. When I emerged back into the hall, the others had spread in pairs, checking the walls all the way down.
“Here!” Lacey called out, half-immersed in the wavering wall at the end. “There’s stairs here.”
We followed her through into a small landing with the same flat black walls. Only a thin streak of light from somewhere above outlined the shape of a straight, narrow staircase ahead of us, leading up.
“I’ll go first,” Lacey announced, starting forward.
“We don’t know what other traps might be set,” Prisha warned, but Lacey didn’t slow down.
I hurried after her. For all her newfound confidence, her castings hadn’t been the most precise. Maybe I didn’t want to be an attack dog, but I wasn’t sending someone else off to be a sacrificial lamb either.
The others tramped up behind us. We were just a few steps from the top when a sentry poked its “head” into the space above us and thrust out its arm. Lacey yelped as the magic it flung at us glittered into a netlike grid. The melody reverberating through it gave me the same dampened impression as our voices. I snapped out my casting, and the lines broke apart with more of a gasp than a crackle.
The sentry peeked out for another attack. Lacey sputtered a quick line. Her conjured burst of flame had enough power that the air thrummed, but it hit the blocky figure in the legs, missing the glowing spot completely. The sentry stumbled and reached for the wall to steady itself in a gesture so human the sight sent a sliver of ice through my stomach.
Before I could form a second casting, Mark barked out a few words by my shoulder. His tiny glowing meteor whined past me with a vibration so erratic it made me cringe—but it smacked the sentry on target. The figure split in two and then into a dozen tumbling pieces.
“What was it trying to do to us?” Judith said quietly.
“Capture us, it looked like,” I said, remembering the conjured maybe-net.
Prisha motioned us upward. “Let’s move.”
Nothing else confronted us as we gathered in the second-floor hall, which was as unnervingly blank and dark as the one we’d left below. Desmond shuffled a little ahead of the rest of us.
“I can hearken it over here. There’s got to be a doorway...” His fingers sank into the wall, and he grinned. “There you are.”
Mark leaned in beside him. “All clear,” he called back.
The rest of us filed into the room, eyeing the seamless black walls.
“This is a little anticlimactic,” Finn remarked, though he sounded not at all disappointed by that fact. “I don’t see any item, though.”
Through the magic’s hum, a faint hiss reached my ears. I turned toward the seemingly bare space along the wall and lowered my hands. At knee height, my fingers caught on a metallic surface. I grasped it, and suddenly there was a thin silver box in my hands. The threads of a ’chantment tingled against my skin.
Lacey giggled. “This place is crazy,” she said. “Can I see it?”
I handed the box to her and watched carefully as she turned it over. It had no obvious lid or latch, but the examiners hadn’t asked us to open it. I wasn’t sure I’d want to find out what was inside.
“Great,” Judith said with a shudder. “Now let’s get out of here already.”
I turned, and a strange heat wafted over me from the direction in which Mark was standing. I jerked around to see what he was casting, but he wasn’t speaking or even moving, just studying the box as I had. He looked completely unaware that anything unusual might be going on, and yet magic had condensed around him with a vibration so piercing I could almost hear it as well as hearken it.
A chill raced down my back. “Mark,” I said, “are you—”
“Everyone get back!” Prisha shouted.
A blaze of even deeper heat washed over us, and a squad of sentries burst from the far wall where there’d been no door before; I’d checked. My mind stalled in shock. Then I threw myself forward. The sentries were already lashing out with magic. Laser-sharp streaks riding on a sizzling wave whipped through the air toward Mark. He screamed.
“Como veían que resistía!” I yelled, pushing every ounce of force I could summon into each word. We needed a shield.
The barrier slammed up, knocking the sentries to the ground, but a sliver of their slashing magic slipped through. I batted it away from my face on instinct, and it sliced straight through the base of the smallest finger on my right hand.
Pain lanced through my hand as I clutched the bleeding stump to my chest. Mark was groaning on the floor, his clothes scorched and his face mottled red and black. Even as I dropped down beside him, the sentries were righting themselves on the other side of my shield. I didn’t know if it’d be strong enough.
Any lingering doubts I’d had about destroying those things fell away. I snapped out my shattering lyric. Behind me, other voices called out in simultaneous castings, and the sentries shuddered and crumbled in the wake of our intent.
“Let’s go, let’s go!” Prisha shouted.
Finn and Desmond crouched with me beside Mark. He’d curled up on his side, his breath ragged. His arm trembled where it was pressed against the burnt tatters of his shirt.
“The casting went right through him,” Desmond said. “I can’t fix this.”
Of course he couldn’t. Every inch of Mark’s body looked scalded or burnt.
My eyes turned watery. I’d felt something was going wrong. I should have spoken up sooner, gotten to him faster. I was supposed to be the one protecting us all.
“You’re bleeding,” Finn said, so close I felt his breath.
He grasped my right hand with its severed stump of a baby finger. My mind tipped as I looked at the stream of blood down my forearm. That last casting had left my nerves jangling. Suddenly the floor didn’t feel so solid.
Desmond shifted closer, and Finn’s grip tightened.
“Do what you can for him,” Finn said, his voice strangely harsh as he nodded to Mark. “I’ll help her.”
“Finn,” I said, but he was already rasping out a verse in some dead language. His jaw clenched, and his hand trembled. The wound on mine sealed over.
The color had seeped from his face, and when he smiled at me, it looked almost sickly. But I wasn’t bleeding anymore.
“There,” he said.
I didn’t have time to make sure he was okay or to gather myself to help Desmond or anything else, because two more sentries popped into the room with a crackle.
Lacey belted out two castings, one that went wild and one that smashed its target, but more sentries were arriving. My shield shuddered with their attack. Desmond grabbed Mark’s legs, and I lunged for his shoulders. Mark groaned.
He was dying. And if we didn’t get him out of here soon, the rest of us would join him.
Chapter Thirteen
Finn
Apparently it was possible to drain your magical abilities so thoroughly you went through the pain and emerged into something more like numbness. My headache had erupted the second I’d joined the group in fending off the charge of sentries, but when I’d pushed all my intent into sealing Rocío’s finger, it had ballooned until the sharper edges fell away beyond my consciousness. The world around me was warped and blurred, as if I were moving underwater.
Judith and Lacey pushed around me to help Rocío and Desmond lift Mark’s body, and Prisha was waving frantically from the doorway. The sentries battered at Rocío’s wall with flares and crackles of magic.
I staggered upright, swaying away from them. The floor felt perfectly flat, but my damned feet couldn’t seem to find purchase. I stumbled out of the room as quickly as I could manage without tipping over.
My gaze fell on Mark, carried along by the others beside me, and my stomach lurched. His spectacular mohawk was blackened to a crisp. Blisters had transformed the wan skin of his face into a riot of angry pink and crackled brown. His lips were contorted with agony, and his eyelids were clenched tight, red around the rims as if weeping blood.
He needed help. He needed everything we could give him. I should be helping him.
I reached toward him, and my feet tangled beneath me. I groped at the wall, staggering as I caught my balance.
I couldn’t even help carry him without risking dropping him.
As we rushed down the hall, a thought crept through my daze like a stream of frigid air. Everyone around me had used more magic in the last hour than I had all day, and they were still steady on their feet, still casting. I was the only one hollowed out. Even Judith, with one arm out of commission, was doing more than I was capable of to support Mark.
I wasn’t just a middling mage who’d never found his footing. Gnôthi seautón. I was the weakest one here, by a significant margin. By what incredible luck had I scraped through the first few tests to make it this far?
Had I even scraped through? The chill cut deeper. Every mediocre grade I’d received in class—every mild compliment a teacher had offered me, even—must have been skewed in my favor in recognition of my family. Otherwise I’d have known I had no business declaring for the Exam. I’d have known how far below standard I measured. Were the examiners following the same line: bump me along at a bare pass, make me Champion as heedlessly as they’d named me Chosen before, and shuffle me off to a tutor who’d direct me straight into the spot that had been delegated to me from the start?
A screech reverberated through the air from behind us, and we all flinched. My heart beat wildly.
Maybe not. Maybe next year I’d be a cautionary tale like Shasti’s brother, and someone like me would look back on my reported death and think, I’d have expected him to know better than to try.
Fates help me, I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t fall here and take the others down with me. If Mark or anyone else died here, it would be my fault.
“Rocío!” Prisha yelled.
My head jerked up. There was no bossiness in Prisha’s voice now, only the same shrill terror clawing through me. She’d reached the top of the stairs we’d come up and then pressed herself against the wall as if to jerk out of range of something below. Just ahead of me, Rocío hesitated, her gaze on Prisha, her knuckles white where she clutched Mark.
No. I couldn’t let her hold herself back. We needed her casting more than we needed her carrying.
I grabbed ahold of Mark’s shoulder as securely as I could and nudged Roc
ío to go on. She dashed toward the stairwell the second my arm touched hers.
I could manage this. One foot. The next foot. Across from me, Judith emitted a strangled squeaking sound as she shifted her grasp on Mark’s arm. I couldn’t think any less of her for it when it was taking all my concentration just to stay upright.
Rocío and Prisha ducked in and out of the stairwell. The air shuddered with their expelled castings. As Judith, Desmond, and I hauled Mark over to them, Lacey darted ahead of us with an unnervingly exhilarated gasp. “I can smash some too!” she said.
Mark squirmed, and my hold faltered. I grappled to balance both of us without inflicting more pain.
A groan broke from his mouth. “You’re useless,” he mumbled without opening his eyes. “All of you. Useless.”
My scrambling fingers must have pressed on a particularly raw spot, because he cried out. My whole body had gone as hot as if I’d been the one burned.
“We’re trying!” Judith cried.
“I know,” Mark said, his voice scarcely audible between the oddly dampening walls. “Please...”
I shoved most of my arm under his back, teetered, and found a brief equilibrium.
“Come on!” Prisha hollered. “The stairs are clear!”
We squeezed down the flight of stairs in one solid mass, the bodies around me holding me in place. Rocío sang out a casting. The air glinted around us, but my numbed senses didn’t hearken even a whisper of the magic she’d conducted. Some sort of shield, I guessed.
We were almost at the bottom when Judith glanced back and yelped. Lacey whirled, snapping out a lyric, and the bulky figure at the top of the stairs toppled. The bolt of magic it had conjured twanged across our shield.
Rocío sang out again to fortify her casting. Her forehead was slick with sweat, her bangs plastered to her skin.
The sight jarred me like a kick to the gut. She’d put in more effort than the rest of us from the start, had felt the weight of all our expectations as she blazed the way forward, and now even she was fatiguing.