by Megan Crewe
Another group, this one of five, stumbled through the doorway. They caught sight of the food, and all five fell on it like starved animals.
Had the examiners not given their group any food at all, or had they somehow lost it? One girl brushed past me to grab some of the pasta. I wanted to ask them, but the question stuck in my throat. I didn’t know her at all, and I felt too overwhelmed to navigate a conversation with a stranger. Especially one who looked that desperate.
Judith, Lacey, and Desmond must have been feeling similarly wary, because they stuck close to each other as they grazed from the platters. Desmond’s lips moved briefly with a casting too quiet for me to make out. Something to help him navigate the room with so many people close together?
Prisha had stopped by the gangly guy with dark red hair who’d hassled Judith before. Callum, she’d said his name was.
“So your group survived,” she remarked a little tersely.
He gave her a flat grin. “Two of us, anyway.”
What had happened to the others with him around? I suppressed a shudder.
Finn had retreated into the corner to lean against the wall. He drained the last of a bottle of orange juice and then lowered his hand to let it dangle from his fingers. Despite his banter when he’d first recovered, he looked uncertain now.
I remembered the story he’d told me in the underground passage about his failed demonstration for his granduncle’s colleague and his shame afterward. Suddenly I could see that crushed boy in the young man in front of me. Was he embarrassed that he’d fainted? My heart squeezed.
I slipped out of the crowd around the tables to join him.
He lifted his head as I reached him. “Hey,” he said with a lopsided smile. “How are you doing?”
“I— You know...” I didn’t have the words to adequately express the jumble inside me, at least not any I wanted to say out loud.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s about the size of it.” He laughed, but there was an edge to it that bothered me. “Sorry,” he added. “I’m a little spacey still.”
“That casting you pulled to get us out was kind of stupid,” I said, “but you know, it was also pretty spectacular.”
The light I’d wanted to see came back into his eyes. “You think so?” he said with closer to his usual breezy tone. “All part of my devious plan to impress you. If I’ve managed that, then the rest is just icing.”
“Maybe try a little less hard next time?” I suggested, and he laughed for real. His hand edged toward me, and without thinking I took the unspoken invitation, twining my fingers with his.
This was stupid. It couldn’t mean anything. But all I wanted was to rest my head against his chest the way I had in the tunnel and let him talk my fears away, if only for a moment.
“Rocío,” Finn said, “I—”
A crinkling sound quivered through the air, and three more examiners appeared in the empty area at the other end of the room, startling us. My hand jerked from Finn’s, and one of the other examinees in the room dropped a bottle that thumped on the floor. Another’s back jarred the table.
A couple days ago, we might have turned toward unexpected arrivals with only curiosity. Instincts could be reprogrammed so quickly.
The examiner in the middle stepped ahead of the two men flanking her. Her tall, elegant bearing and pale gray hair made me think swan.
“Hello, examinees,” she said in a voice that rang through the room. “I’m Examiner Lancaster, and I’m pleased to welcome you to this way station at the midpoint of your Exam. Congratulations to you four groups—or parts of groups, at least—on successfully completing your most recent trial. Please note that you are not to use magic again until you enter the next stage of the Exam.”
Only four? So one group hadn’t reached their objective at all? My stomach sank as I glanced around the room, taking a quick count.
Eighteen. Eighteen of us were left of the thirty-five who’d been sent off to the dorm rooms the other night.
How many of the missing seventeen had simply failed to complete a task and been whisked away for burning out, and how many had fallen like Mark?
How many had died?
“Please gather together so we can discuss exactly what you have accomplished,” Examiner Lancaster went on.
I didn’t know what she meant by that, but her eager tone jarred my nerves. What we’d “accomplished” was seeing one of us tortured nearly to death.
I glanced at Finn, and he shrugged before peeling himself off the wall. We headed past the tables to rejoin the others. He walked with carefully steady steps. I wanted to offer him my arm for support, but I didn’t think he’d take it.
We stopped at the fringes of the group. “You should be the one to give them the box,” he said in a low voice. “You’re the one who found it.”
“Desmond got us most of the way there,” I pointed out. “And Lacey carried it through the mess while we were getting out. We all contributed.”
“Let’s just hope the individual assessments aren’t public, right?” he said with a grimace toward the waiting examiners.
Prisha came up on Finn’s other side and slid her hand around his forearm with a confidence I envied. He leaned toward her just a fraction. “Still alive.”
She rapped him in the side with her elbow. “Stay that way.”
When everyone was standing still and silent, Examiner Lancaster clapped her hands. “Let me begin,” she said, “by showing you where your last test took each of you.”
The two men brought out a contraption like an overlarge easel mounted with a sheet of white canvas. Lancaster held out her hand to us. “Which group will be first to share what they brought home?”
“Here!” Lacey said where she was standing at the front of our small crowd. She brandished the silver box.
Lancaster accepted it and waved her back. “Excellent,” she said. “Group Three, here is the building you were exploring a little more than an hour ago.”
She gestured to the canvas with a melodic murmur. Her casting conjured an image onto its broad surface: a house—a large one, with stucco walls and an arched roof covered in dark red tiles.
“Isfahan, Iran,” she said. “A home identified by our local allies as that of a member of the Middle Eastern Magical Alliance, the extremist faction that is one of our most zealous enemies. Thanks to the risks taken by those friendly Iranians and your efforts after your partial transfer there, the MEMA no longer has access to this one tool.” She sang another soft word, and the box snapped open. A ’chanted holographic map popped up from within.
I couldn’t wrap my head around what she’d said. I’d never seen the house in her picture before. “What do you mean by ‘partial transfer’?” I said. “We weren’t actually there, so how could we have taken anything from there? We were in the Exam area the entire time.”
“Oh,” Lancaster said, “you were there. The ’chantment required is a complicated one, but it allows us to temporarily superimpose a small area anywhere in the world into our Exam building. As soon as you passed the dividing wall, you were half here and half over there.”
A murmur of surprise passed through the examinees around me. My eyes widened. I’d read about small-scale superimposing—of internal organs onto a model, for example, to allow operations without having to cut open the patient—but not an entire building that people could literally walk around in. How many mages had it taken to pull that off? No wonder it had felt so indistinct and unreal.
“So we were in the Exam room... and somewhere else at the same time?” someone said, sounding puzzled.
Lancaster motioned toward the image of the house. “In a way. Your physical presence was mainly here. You would have appeared to anyone who saw you there as nothing more than a vague figure, as unrecognizable as our ’chantment made the guards appear to you. But it wouldn’t be as valid a test if we weren’t putting you in an at least partly real-world scenario.”
The guards. The sentries? All those figur
es we’d blasted apart?
“Wait,” Judith said in a thin voice. “The sentries were real? The message said they were automated. I thought...”
Lancaster shook her head sharply. The bottom dropped out of my gut. Finn squeezed my shoulder. He looked straight at the examiner, his mouth pressed flat, but he held on to me, keeping me from swaying.
The sentries had been people. That was what had felt off about them to me. They’d moved like human beings, too subtle to be programmed conjurings. How could she talk about this so calmly?
“We have to be a little obscure in the earlier stages of the Exam,” Lancaster was saying. “We can’t reveal the full truth of the matter until you’ve passed far enough to have earned it. Now—”
“What happened to the... sentries we destroyed?” Desmond broke in.
Lancaster pursed her lips. “Your magic affected their true bodies, just as theirs affected yours. But we were able to include a target in our ’chantment to help you guide your castings effectively. They had no such advantage.”
A target. That pulse. It’d looked like the beat of a heart because that was what it had been. Then we’d...
“We killed them,” I said, too shocked to hold my tongue, and an anxious muttering rippled between the examinees around me. “We thought it was only a test, but you had us kill people—real people.”
How many of those blocklike forms had I struck down on the way to retrieving the box? Five? Six? And how many more on the way out? A wave of nausea flipped my stomach. I clamped my teeth together to hold down the hamburger I’d forced myself to eat.
“They were enemy combatants,” Lancaster replied with an odd gentleness. “They do the same to our people every chance they have. You should be proud of how you helped the entire nation today. This is the job you’ve been working toward.”
“Job?” Finn said hoarsely. “What are you talking about?”
Lancaster folded her hands in front of her. “I was getting to that,” she said. “With this test, with the abilities you’ve shown in making it through, you’ve taken your first true step toward becoming the Confederation’s most valuable soldiers.”
Soldiers?
“Excuse me?” someone said, and someone else spat out a startled, “What?” Beside me, Finn sucked in a breath.
I wouldn’t have thought I could reel any more than I already was, but my knees wobbled.
Lancaster gave us a small smile that was knowing in a way I didn’t like at all. “You’re all aware that we’ve faced numerous threats from mages and Dull societies abroad,” she said. “The Unveiling happened so that we could better protect everyone within this nation, magical or otherwise. But to hold on to our advantage, we must take risks.
“Every day, military campaigns are run covertly around the world in collaboration with our many allies. We do our best to keep the upper hand against those who would undermine our security and who would escalate any successful breach into a full-out war. Those of you who make Champion will serve on the front lines of those efforts as part of the Confederation’s Special Operations team.”
No. That wasn’t right. We were fighting to keep our magic, to get our spot in the college, to have our studies assisted—whether we needed it or not—by a respected tutor. Not to actually fight.
But we’d already fought. We’d fought and killed, like the soldiers she was saying we were going to become.
The sentries had attacked us too, of course, but why wouldn’t they have? We’d charged at them throwing spells, broken into their employer’s home… I didn’t know what those people had done in the past, but in that moment they’d only been defending themselves. From us.
“If you make Champion,” Lancaster went on, “when you are fully in the field, most missions will allow for more... subtlety than that test. Less combat and more reconnaissance. Unfortunately, the protections that enemy mages keep on their residences and workplaces make it difficult to create a precise experience through the partial transfer. Nonetheless, you have proven yourselves.”
We’d proven ourselves. The Confederation’s most valuable soldiers. You should be proud.
I shivered. What was there to be proud of? If they’d wanted value, they’d have picked the cream of the crop from the academies, from the college. But no, they were testing the novices they’d already deemed not quite good enough, the ones desperate enough to risk unknown trials just to keep their magical ability. Old-magic disappointments. New-magic street trash no one had expected much from anyway.
Of course they were. No one would be paying that much attention to what the Champions did after they left the Exam. Our families would just be glad we were employed somewhere, somehow.
Our “value” to the Confed was how expendable we were.
I remembered Mark talking about his brother—the one who’d been made Champion, the one who’d all but disappeared on him. No wonder. How could you talk about your life when it was made up of secret military missions to steal, to kill? The thought of telling my parents what I’d done here, even unknowingly, made me queasy all over again.
Had Javi made it this far? Had he heard the same announcement? I could almost hear his horrified mutter. Of course. Why wouldn’t these cabrones trick us into doing their dirty work?
The actual muttering around me grew louder. “That’s not how this is supposed to work!” a boy across the room from me protested, and another said, “No one told us! I thought...” And behind me a girl was chattering under her breath so rapidly the words blurred together.
Finn stood motionless at my side, his hand clamped on my shoulder. I wasn’t sure anymore which of us was holding the other up.
Examiner Lancaster raised her graceful arm and snapped her fingers. All of us fell silent.
“We realize not everyone can stomach this sort of work,” she said. “We have pushed you to your limits specifically to determine what each of you is made of, whether you could withstand whatever brutality the enemy may deal out if a mission takes a turn for the worse. The Champion’s role comes with many pressures and, yes, horrors. Anyone lacking the necessary strength—magical, mental, and physical—would be a liability in the field.”
She paused. “You should know that there are two more stages of the Exam you will have to pass if you’re to make Champion. Stages that will stretch your endurance even further.”
Someone on the other side of the room let out a laugh that sounded almost hysterical. Beside Desmond, Judith had twisted her fingers into the fabric of her sling.
“You will have a short time to rest and think before the Exam continues,” Lancaster said. “I can tell you right now that fewer than half of you should expect to receive the honor of being named Champion. Any who wish to forfeit their chance and accept burning out may come to us with that request during the next several hours. The last thing we want is to force anyone to proceed unwillingly. But first, why don’t you hear what else your amateur operations have accomplished? Which group will bring their finding forward next?”
The gangly red-haired boy—Callum—strode over. Lancaster brought up an image of another building on her canvas, in Moscow she said, but I shut my eyes. My mind was spinning too fast for me to follow more of her words.
They didn’t want to force anyone unwilling? Then they hadn’t given us the freedom to make that choice properly. The only roads that lay ahead of me were giving up all magic, accepting death, or becoming a murderer however many times over.
Chapter Fifteen
Finn
If I’d ever been a champion at anything, it was sleeping. When I was a kid, Margo had teased me about how I could nod off no matter what family chaos was transpiring around me. Even that first night in the Exam’s dorm room, despite all our uncertainty about what awaited us in the morning, I’d been exhausted enough to drift off within a few minutes.
Tonight, I wasn’t so lucky. Lying on a mat amid the restless breathing of the other remaining examinees, I couldn’t settle my mind.
I
was exhausted, make no mistake. In the hours since I’d collapsed after my massive casting, my bones had gradually become less rubbery and my muscles less jellified, but a dull ache lingered in the spaces between them. A sharper pain prodded the backs of my eyes now that Prisha’s last numbing ’chantment had worn off.
What wrenched at me the most, though, was the memory of my conjured force sending the sentries’ magic crashing through that pitch-black hall.
What had become of the elegant house Examiner Lancaster had presented to us after I’d ravaged it? What remained of the bodies I’d... ripped apart? Had I wrought devastation as horrifying as the photos the examiners had shown us for inspiration two days ago?
Margo had killed a rat. I’d slaughtered at least half a dozen human beings.
I rolled over, and the dissolving rod jabbed my hip. Had my sister known this was what the Exam entailed? Had my father? He’d mentioned the responsibilities of being made Champion...
No, I didn’t think he’d been conscious of the full picture. If he had, I couldn’t conceive of him backing down on the matter of my rescinding my declaration. He’d just had an inkling that there were unknown elements—elements he’d consider unsavory.
Maybe I should have listened to them. My being Chosen could scarcely seem more a farce now. I certainly didn’t feel like a Champion in any way, let alone the sort Lancaster had spoken of.
At a rustling beside me, I half opened my eyes. Prisha was getting up. She padded around the other prone figures to the doorway. Going to the bathroom, presumably.
The relative brightness of the dim hall lights sliced into the darkness of our room. Several minutes passed. Prisha didn’t reappear.
A girl from group five had gone to the examiners as soon as our debriefing was finished and hadn’t returned. But Prisha wouldn’t forfeit without even talking to me. Still, I found myself waiting, watching the doorway. A restless itch passed through me. We’d had time to shower before lights out, but my two-days-worn clothes felt worse against my freshly clean skin than they had before.