Ruthless Magic

by Megan Crewe

  I opened myself up and let her in.

  A torrent of the magic she’d channeled burst into me and through me. It jerked away my breath. Radiating up through my ribcage and behind my eyes, it burned away my headache and every other sensation beyond the energy Rocío was conducting through herself and into me.

  I urged the vast wave of it up toward the shield. The more energy I cast out, the more that poured in, so swiftly I thought I might float off the ground on it.

  The magic battered the conjured barrier like a caged animal frantic to escape. I barely needed to direct it. The shield groaned, silent but echoing into my bones.

  Images wavered through my mind with the rush of magic. Maybe Rocío didn’t have quite enough focus left to fully control what she passed to me, or maybe this was how it always worked when mages conducted magic together—I’d never accepted anywhere near this much from anyone else.

  Some of my impressions came from the present moment: I experienced the balling of her hands as she stared at the bulky guy she’d transfixed in place, the knots in her gut at the sight of the corpses strewn in the arena and her drive to ensure she didn’t add to that number… and the urgent clutching of the magic around her—like a living creature, just as she’d said.

  Other glimpses were different. Others were of me.

  Through her eyes, from within her remembered body, I saw myself in the Academy’s library grinning at the library assistant and felt a tickle of warm curiosity. I watched me interrupting Callum’s trick on Judith during the defensive test and chatting up Desmond and Mark during dinner not long after. I absorbed her loneliness in the underground passage and its release when I’d taken her hand, the comfort she’d drawn from that touch... and her fear that it wouldn’t last.

  A lump lodged in my throat. I wouldn’t have guessed there was much that scared Rocío, but she’d been afraid of me—because she cared. She cared so much it filled me like a soaring wind: her terror witnessing my collapse after our raid on the Iranian house and her pain confronting an illusion of me scraping a blade across my neck amid the deceptive shadows in the maze. I rode out the surge of panic that had flooded her when she’d discovered me slumped and blood-drenched outside the vines’ trap, the wave of relief mingled with sorrow when I’d offered to follow her back into the fray for Judith.

  Woven through every memory, every other emotion, was the tender yet wrenching mix of protectiveness and affection coursing through her right now, her support for what I was trying to accomplish—for who I was.

  In her mind, I had never been found wanting.

  I could recall the opposite sensation so sharply in contrast: the day I’d declared, the day a shield of my own making had crumbled apart along with my father’s hopes for me. I could taste it, the way the strands of magic had stretched until they’d snapped.

  As if latching on to that image in my head, the torrent of magic Rocío was directing to me heaved through me even more swiftly. It focused into a point, pressing into one small spot on the shield’s curve. Up, up, up it pushed, stretching the surface, thinning it.

  Every quiver of energy whipped through my nerves as I threw my intent after it with my fading voice, until the boundaries between me and the magic blurred. I was nothing but its vessel. In that moment when I no longer had a sense of where I began or ended, the surrender felt like something sacred.

  The shield cracked. It gaped apart along one widening seam, and all the magic outside crashed in to embrace the parts we’d drained. With a sigh I hearkened through every cell, the conjured barrier above us shattered into a shower of gauzy shards.

  As they rained down on us, my knees gave, and I fell too. My vision, the world, and Rocío slipped from my grasp.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Rocío

  The cracking of the enormous shield overhead sent a giddy tremor into the energy coursing through my body—into the strands of intent aimed ahead of me at our opponents on the ground and into the wide-open stream I’d channeled toward Finn behind me without any directive other than that it follow his will.

  Then the magic slammed down on us.

  The deluge whirled around me in a breath-stealing embrace. It splintered my vision and left every nerve jittering. My tie to Finn broke off, and my conjured hold on the other boy faltered too. I leaned against the broken stone in front of me, reached out to the magic whipping around me, and threw a mass of it at the hulking boy again.

  Thankfully, the sudden wave of power had startled our opponents too. They’d hardly moved. Desmond swayed with a trembling laugh, but he clamped his hold back in place too. Leonie swore, and Prisha said, “I’m here! I’m here!” The wiry boy who’d been shoving himself upright froze too.

  The magic that had streamed through the broken shield was settling over us, its hum as full and vibrant as magic was meant to be. The limited portion that had been trapped inside the arena had weakened so gradually during the fighting that I hadn’t realized just how depleted it had become until now, feeling it set right.

  My nerves settled with the sensation. Our conjured bonds holding the trio across from us in place felt suddenly airy. I could have held all three of them if I’d needed to. Since I had only one at the moment, I dared for the first time to look behind me, to make sure that Finn was okay.

  As I turned my head, a blur of motion hurtled toward me.

  Lacey rammed into me, knocking me to the ground with her fingers jamming around my throat. My concentration broke. Leonie gave a little cry, and I knew the hulking guy must have shaken off my casting. I kicked and shoved at Lacey, bizarrely grateful for the childhood ambushes of Dull bullies that had taught me how to fend off the worst of a beatdown.

  Lacey had dealt with bullies too—of course she had—but she wasn’t used to being on the offensive. She matched me squirm for squirm, jabbing me with her knee, her head knocking against mine, but her grip on my neck loosened.

  I thrust my hand backward to tap out a stuttered rhythm on the ground. My casting heaved me up, rolling us over with me on top. I jerked one of Lacey’s hands to the ground and smacked the other away. My throat burned, but I managed to swallow.

  Lacey spat a casting into my face. I thrust my arm up. My skin seared with a conjuring that would have blinded me if I’d been any slower. She mashed her elbow into my ribs, and I fell off her.

  Something hard wrenched against my back. As I scrambled around, Lacey spun away from me as if to make for the others by the fallen spire. A blast of conjured hail pelted down at us, battering my head in the second before I managed to gasp out a shield. The others were shouting—the trio must have gotten free.

  I had to stop them, all of them, now. I had to stop this before anyone else died.

  Lacey veered in the opposite direction, a knife flashing in her hand. She’d yanked it from the sheath still wedged against my spine. Then I saw where she was headed now.

  Finn was lying limp on the ground beside the hedge, his head lolling, his lips nearly as pale as the rest of his face. Completely defenseless.

  Panic ripped through me. I dashed after Lacey, shouting out a lyric that tangled her feet. She tripped and sprawled. As I came up on her, she hurled the knife at me with a shrieked casting.

  The blade barely nicked my shoulder. Her aim was still shaky.

  “Stop!” I said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want anyone getting hurt. Can’t you just stop?”

  “My whole life, I’ve been stopping to keep other people happy,” Lacey rasped. “You think that didn’t hurt me? I’m never—”

  Her fingers were moving to beat out another casting. I grasped for the words I’d used before to still, to quiet. “Arru arru.”

  Lacey’s arms and legs pressed flat to the ground. Her mouth clamped shut, her pale hair strewn on the ground around her head. She glared at me standing over her.

  Desmond and Prisha hollered to each other. The shield I’d thrown over me shuddered with some casting from behind me. The freed magic twined throu
gh my body, cringing at the rage that echoed up from Lacey through my hold.

  I had to get back, had to stop our other attackers, but I could feel to my bones that the instant I shifted my focus from Lacey, she’d be at me—or Finn—again. We could all die because of her. Because she wouldn’t listen.

  My pulse thudded, and all at once I saw a glimmer in Lacey’s head. As I stared at it, the magic between us hummed louder. Her desire to cast trembled through its wavering glow. I could hearken the strands of magic, delicate and beautiful, weaving in and out of her thoughts from that spot—the spot she hearkened from.

  Certainty that I could crush that glimmer unfurled inside me—from me or the magic, I couldn’t be sure. If I directed all my intent at it, I could sever those strands and cut Lacey off from the magic just as completely as the Confed’s mages had burned out Sean and so many other mages across the country in the last thirty-five years.

  I could break her. I could stop her from breaking anyone else.

  Instinctively, I trained my attention on the shimmering strands. Lacey’s eyes widened. Even as my stomach flipped, some part of me reveled in the understanding. I had the power to decide whether she would ever cast again. I didn’t have to ask her to stop; I could make her.

  Lacey shuddered, and I caught myself. Tears were streaking down the sides of her face. I stared at her, my awareness shrinking back.

  “Rocío?” Finn said faintly, somewhere to my right. My thoughts hazed with a wash of cold horror.

  The Confed had been right to be afraid of my talent. I wasn’t a dragon-tamer, or at least not just that.

  I was also a dragon.

  An ear-splitting roar blasted through the arena, knocking me off my feet. I tried to push myself back up and found I couldn’t move.

  “All of you stand down,” said Examiner Lancaster’s dry voice. “Your Exam is now concluded.”

  I’d been sitting alone in the small windowless room for at least half an hour when the three examiners finally came in. One was Examiner Lancaster, another the man who’d sent us off to our dorms on the first night, and the third was a younger woman I thought had been in the ring of chairs during our group casting session. They sat across the table from me as if I were a suspect in a police interrogation.

  “Rocío Lopez,” Lancaster said. “These are my colleagues, Examiner Welch and Examiner Khalil. We will be conducting your final evaluation together. How are you?”

  I looked down at my arms and flexed my hands. We’d all been teleported from the arena separately by the mages. The first person I’d seen after that had been a magimedical specialist who’d wiped the burns from my skin and repaired the welts in various muscles while I gulped down an offered snack and a bottle of water. He’d insisted on reconstructing my little finger too, even though I’d protested that I could manage without it.

  I couldn’t manage if I forgot what the Exam—what the Confed—had put me through. But I suspected that was exactly why the examiners healed us: so our bodies gave no evidence of how harshly they’d treated us.

  They’d even given me new clothes: jeans and a T-shirt that looked much like my old ones, but I still had Mom’s sunburst necklace. Its points nipped my fingers as I fidgeted with it.

  “How’s Finn?” I asked instead of answering Lancaster’s question. “Is he all right?” He’d been conscious but still slumped on the ground when the mages had transported us out. I hadn’t seen any of the other examinees since.

  “Mr. Lockwood is recovering well,” Examiner Welch replied, clasping his thick hands, which were as ruddy as his round face, on the table.

  “I want to see him.” I wanted to be sure that what they meant by “recovering” fit my definition. And he’d be worried about me too.

  Or would he? With the urgency of our situation gripping me, I hadn’t worried about what else he might see when I’d pulled all that magic through me and sent it on to him. All the thoughts and feelings, all the memories I’d felt flowing with it, were so much more than I’d have wanted to say to him yet. They might have overwhelmed him. Especially now that he was out, safe and sound, the urgency fading with every minute that separated us from each other and from the Exam.

  We’d gotten out. That was what mattered. I’d done everything I could, and at least five of the seven in our group had made it through the Exam alive. And five other examinees were alive as well, at least partly because we hadn’t fought back.

  “There will be time for you to speak with him later,” Lancaster said.

  “And everyone else?” Other than Finn, mostly what I’d been thinking about in the last few hours had been the moment when I’d almost ripped Lacey’s magic from her.

  I could have done it. I might have done it. How would that have been any better than ripping off a limb?

  No matter how the Confed wanted to frame it, I knew the violence I’d almost committed had nothing to do with my new-magic roots. All they’d done was prove that anyone with power, old magic or new, was dangerous when pushed to their limits. What did they think of the horrors Callum and the others had carried out since entering the Exam?

  Even Finn—gentle, honorable Finn—had left the arena with Callum’s blood smeared across his shirt. The memory wrenched at me.

  I didn’t think the examiners knew what I’d almost done. As long as I didn’t let anyone push me that far ever again, they never needed to know.

  Lancaster pursed her lips. “First we need to discuss your performance in the Exam.”

  I wanted to not care, but I couldn’t stop myself from tensing. Were they going to tell me it hadn’t been good enough? That despite everything I’d survived and everyone I’d helped, they were burning me out?

  “It was really quite impressive.” Examiner Khalil shot me a flash of a smile that brought a deeper dimple into her cheeks, which were faintly flecked with acne scars. Her slim fingers fidgeted with the edge of the gray hijab draped over her hair and across her shoulders.

  “I agree.” Welch rested his piercing gaze on me. “I’m not sure I’ve seen anything quite like it before.”

  Was that a good assessment or bad? “Thank you?” I ventured, and this time Lancaster smiled, slow and sharp.

  “You don’t need to worry, Miss Lopez,” she said. “We’re pleased to declare you one of this year’s Champions.”

  I was probably supposed to experience some rush of triumphant relief. Instead, my body tensed further. “What?”

  “We’re naming six Champions,” Welch put in. “And you are one of them. If you’ll accept the position. Of course, the alternative is a voluntary forfeit.”

  “You mean I’d be burned out.”

  Khalil’s mouth twitched. “Yes,” she said softly.

  They were watching me intently now. Under the table, my hands closed into fists.

  Accept the position? Become one of their secret soldiers? I’d wanted to keep my magic. I’d wanted to win... but not for that “reward.”

  Not to work for people who’d thought nothing of putting fifty-seven teenagers—and others too—through hell.

  “You said we’d be sent on missions against our country’s enemies,” I said. “That if we had to kill, it would be ‘enemy combatants.’ But those people you sent at us in the hospital gowns... How can you justify that?”

  How do I know you won’t ask me to do that again?

  The examiners didn’t look fazed by the question. Lancaster leaned forward with a strangely maternal air.

  “Rocío,” she said, “I know it may seem this way after the ordeals you’ve just been through, but we’re not monsters. The people you encountered volunteered to be used in our test in exchange for financial compensation. They are all alive and well. Striking the target spot merely put their bodies into stasis. It didn’t actually kill them.”

  I blinked at her. Her words didn’t quite sink in. The woman’s terrified face flashed through my memory. “They looked so scared,” I said.

  “They hadn’t been told the exact nat
ure of the test,” Khalil said, her expression earnest. “They believed the announcement in that moment, just as you did. But they don’t even remember it now. We ’chanted away those memories.”

  “It was a cruel scenario to put you all in,” Lancaster said, “but the real enemies you’ll face will be much more ruthless, and sometimes you may have to decide between one life and many. We must be cruel to ensure our Champions are up to the task, but we believe the thousands you may save in that role more than justifies the cost.”

  That was easy for her to decide when she wasn’t the one paying that cost. I was still struggling to believe her. “What if we hadn’t ‘killed’ them? What if— I didn’t kill anyone in that test.”

  “There would have been no explosions,” Welch said briskly. “They would have reached each of you simultaneously, and any examinee who hadn’t complied would have been removed from the Exam. As to your own completion of the test, you were interrupted, but in light of your behavior before and after, we are satisfied that you would have carried through when you’d exhausted your other options.”

  I might not have exhausted them. I might have broken your horrible lie of a ’chantment. But I knew better than to say that out loud.

  I supposed this would be their answer to any complaint I could make about what had happened to Mark and Judith, about the carnage they’d allowed if not encouraged in the arena, about all the Exam’s horrors: The brutality was worth it if it revealed which of us was most equipped to fight in turn for our country.

  Every complaint except one.

  “There’s something else we need to talk about,” I said.

  Welch gave me a thin smile. “What is that?”

  “Whatever military operations the Confed is involved with—they’re not good for the magic,” I said. “They’re… The castings that hurt and destroy people or things weaken the magic too.”

  The three examiners exchanged a glance. I wanted to think someone in the Confed already knew about this, but maybe they didn’t after all. The other examinees hadn’t felt it. The magic had reached out only to me. Maybe it had sensed I could hearken it well and that I’d be willing to listen.