Ruthless Magic Read online

  We might not make it out of this building alive—any of us.

  We burst into the first-floor hallway. Our exit was lost in the blackness at the other end, but it was there. We had only to cross that distance.

  With my pulse pounding in my ears, I threw myself forward alongside the others, not letting myself care how much I jostled Mark. Getting him out of here was the greatest kindness I could offer.

  We’d made it three steps when a squad of sentries barreled out of the wall ahead of us.

  Rocío and Prisha barked out their destructive castings in ragged voices, and Lacey belted out hers. One, two, three sentries shattered or crumbled as the varying conjurings struck the pulsing glows on their chests.

  There were more. The air shook with the magic the sentries hurled at us in turn, so violent that even I could hearken it now.

  Sweat streaked down my back. Our bubble of protection was heating up. Rocío paused to reinforce the shield. Her legs wobbled for a second before she braced herself against the wall.

  I opened my mouth, but all that came out was a hoarse sputter. Hades take me, I didn’t know what to tell her, what I could possibly suggest that might save us, how I might make the slightest contribution.

  I’d come into the Exam like Phaeton commandeering his father’s chariot, believing my family’s magical talent had to be hiding within me somewhere. Now I was watching the world set ablaze by my conceit.

  Mark’s muscles seized up in my hands, stiffening against my fingers. Then his body went as slack as a wet rug.

  “Set him down!” Desmond said.

  Judith sobbed. I crouched with them, my eyes fixed on Mark’s chest, the seared skin beneath the charred rags of his shirt. It didn’t move.

  I pressed my palm to his ribs. “He’s not breathing.”

  As Desmond groped for Mark’s wrist, Rocío dropped down beside me. She touched Mark’s neck, and her face tensed. “His heart’s stopped.”

  She moved to bend over his chest, and I scrambled to the side to make way. Setting her hands on his sternum, she murmured something in Spanish.

  Mark’s body twitched and stilled. Rocío grimaced and tried again.

  I recognized the pose from our magimedical emergency first-aid seminars, which the tutorial classes must have received too. She was trying to jumpstart his heart with magic the way a Dull doctor would with electric paddles.

  As Desmond hunched to take a turn, Prisha called out in a quavering voice, “Can someone help, please?”

  I swiveled and fell, banging my knees on the floor. Prisha and Lacey had backed up almost to Mark’s prone body, and the shield was still contracting. More blocklike figures were charging at us through the hall, hurtling magic in thrashing whips and sizzling bolts of energy. Lacey yelled a few words that seemed to slow the sentries, but they were almost on us.

  The warbling in my head rose like a wave about to crash, wrenching all the air from my lungs.

  No. We were not falling here. I had to do something—something that would make a difference, for once in my sorry lie of a life.

  I pitched myself onto my feet. My body felt like a blank wash of panic, but through that terror rose a single goal: the door. A spear of adrenaline spiked through me.

  The thunder of the sentries’ onslaught rattled through the barrier and into my bones. They were a hair from smashing our shield.

  No. Push it back. I had to.

  A verse popped into my mouth. A throbbing ache seared even deeper into my head, but I pulled magic to me with every shred of my being. “Sustulit et magnum magno conamine misit.” In, in, in, swelling around my joints, jangling under my teeth and down my spine, into every hollow I could gather it in. Into every mistake, into every failure, into every place found wanting.

  Bile shot up my throat, and I almost choked. But I propelled myself forward, shouting the verse once more, and hurled all that power out of me toward the hulking shapes descending on us.

  It likely wouldn’t have been sufficient if I’d tried to simply pummel them. I couldn’t have orchestrated that much magic to my will even in my blaze of desperation. But my mind had fixated on shoving their attacks back at them, and that was precisely what my conjuring did, without my fully comprehending the design of my frantic casting.

  The amplifying wave of magic I’d called up slammed into the sentries’ battery of conjurings and repelled all of that energy backward with twice as much force. The power of their own attacks exploded back through the sentries with a resounding boom and a spray of crushed rock.

  My desperate lob had given it no focus, though. The energy blared on in all directions, echoing off the walls and ceiling. The building shook.

  A chunk of black stone plummeted to the floor in front of us. A crack opened in the wall next to me, an even deeper black than the darkest I’d thought possible. My tongue tangled for an instant before I found my voice again. It seemed to come from a long, tenuous distance beyond me: “Out! Get out now! The building’s coming down.”

  Prisha snatched the back of my shirt to haul me with her, and I grasped Mark’s arm. I registered that he was breathing again, that this was a good thing, but otherwise the world had narrowed down to a hash of fractured gasps and stumbling limbs. I hurled myself forward with the others.

  Another slab of ceiling fell, clipping me on the shoulder. Powder coated my nose and mouth. We ran and ran as the darkness collapsed in on us. I couldn’t tell which shapes were real and which were caused by my failing vision. Every thump of rock reverberated through my body.

  Prisha shoved open the door to thin gray-brown light. The doorframe crumpled as we tumbled through to sprawl onto the spongy ground outside. “There’s more coming!” Desmond shouted. I tried to raise my head, but I no longer had a solid sense of which way was up or down.

  Rocío’s voice carried through the chaos, clear in the open air. “The wall! Get to the wall where we started. We need shelter.”

  I clasped Mark’s shoulders and heaved him along with the panting figures around me. Follow them, follow them. It didn’t matter if I could see where I was going as long as I stayed with them.

  Wordless bellows rang out from behind us. Light flared around us. Prisha yelped. Mark shuddered in our grasp, but we couldn’t do anything for him here.

  “Almost there,” Judith said. It sounded as much like a plea as encouragement.

  My feet tripped over themselves and rediscovered the ground. An electric clap rattled my skin. Then the glossy black surface of the wall was looming over me.

  We charged around the edge and dove behind it, and the air abruptly stilled.

  My legs buckled. I sagged against the wall, scarcely managing to lower Mark’s body rather than drop him.

  Rocío gazed back the way we’d come. My view, rapidly narrowing into a pinhole, caught on the silver sunburst charm dangling below her collarbone. Somewhere in the mad battle, a bit of magic had touched it, melting two of the tiny points toward each other and faintly blackening the metal. As I stared at it, the shape doubled before my eyes.

  “It’s all gone,” Rocío said. The hiss in my head all but drowned out her words. “The building, the sentries—they just disappeared.”

  “Thank the Fates for that,” Prisha muttered. “I’d had enough of that test.”

  Judith drew in a shaky breath. “What are we going to do for Mark?”

  Rocío swiveled back toward him, her charm swinging. “Is he still breathing? Can we—”

  The hiss heightened, and the air around us shimmered. A melodic voice vibrated through it.

  “Examinee Ornstein forfeits the Exam.”

  With a rush of energy, Mark’s body disappeared.

  “Wait!” Rocío yelled, crouching over the spot where he’d been. “You could at least have given us a chance...”

  To what—to heal him? I wasn’t certain that even a fully trained magimedic could repair the damage done to him. The thought of us novices restoring that ruined body suddenly struck me as so absurd
I might have laughed if I could have found my lungs, my throat.

  Rocío leapt to her feet, the charm snapping to the side, and my vision blurred to nothing. The last thing I felt was the give of my knees as my mind fell away into the void.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Rocío

  “Finn!” Prisha cried out.

  I spun around, my legs wobbly from all the adrenaline that had been coursing through me. Finn sprawled on the ground at the base of the wall, his face ashen and his body limp.

  ¡Dios mío! I dropped to my knees beside him. A piercing chill gripped my chest.

  Not him too.

  Prisha knelt by his other side and set her hand on his forehead. I touched his wrist. His skin was clammy, but a pulse fluttered against my searching fingers. His chest rose with a halting breath.

  He was alive. Alive and not dying, just fainted, I guessed from the strain. I sat back, trying to gather myself. How could I help him?

  He needed me. But it was suddenly hard to think as I looked at him lying there. I’d hardly noticed it happening, but Finn’s smiles and jokes and the honesty behind them had opened up a hopeful space in me that now felt painfully empty.

  “He shouldn’t have done that,” Prisha muttered, looking sick. “Trying to take them all out at once—that was insane. He could have killed himself.”

  “He could have killed all of us,” Judith said, but she sounded more frightened than accusing.

  The ache that had spread through my joints with my repeated castings condensed into a sharp pang behind my ribs. Finn had done it because I’d been busy reviving Mark, as well as I could. And now Mark was gone. To be burned out or to die?

  Was the Confed going to take Finn too? Every second he stayed unconscious, fear clutched me tighter.

  I grasped his hand, even though the movement hurt the stump of my little finger—the stump he’d sealed. If I could just find the words that would wake him up—

  His eyelids jittered and then blinked fully open. He gazed at us staring down at him.

  “I’d better not be dead,” he said, his voice rough, “because the two of you are definitely not allowed to be.”

  Tears sprang into my eyes. I had the urge to throw my arms around him and hold on until he couldn’t doubt how much I wanted him here, making those jokes, smiling his smile—until I’d made up for every moment I’d shut him down or pushed him away.

  “You’re perfectly alive,” Prisha said. “No thanks to you. How about you hold off on any more building-shaking castings for another year or two?”

  Then her gaze darted up and caught mine. For just an instant her face darkened. That twitch of a frown held enough animosity that I rocked backward on my heels, my fingers slipping from Finn’s.

  He didn’t belong with me. He didn’t even belong in my vicinity, outside of the Exam. She knew that as well as I did.

  “I got you all out, didn’t I?” Finn said, wincing as he tried to push himself into a sitting position.

  Prisha caught his shoulder to help him up. He pressed the heel of his hand to his temple. She set her palm over his and murmured a numbing ’chantment.

  His headache was back. So it came from magical rather than physical exhaustion? How dry had Finn run himself even before our frantic dash through the building? Before he’d put everything he had left into that casting? He’d nearly broken himself to save the rest of us.

  He turned and smiled at me, a little sheepishly. Of course he would smile even now. And of course my pulse would leap, as if I’d been waiting just for that.

  I glanced back at the others. Desmond was standing with one hand against the wall, watching our movements. Judith was hovering behind me. Her makeshift sling and her designer clothes were smudged with ash—from Mark’s body. Tear tracks ran down her cheeks. Lacey hung back, clutching the silver box under her arm.

  We’d failed Mark—failed him epically. If I’d been faster to react, faster to recognize the danger...

  I wasn’t going to let myself forget that failure for a second. The rest of us had survived, and I had to make sure we continued to do so.

  “We should head back to the building where we got the message,” I said. “Get the rest of this test over with.”

  “Yes,” Prisha said. “Of course.” The quick smile she flashed me made me wonder if I’d imagined her hostility.

  She motioned for me to help her lift Finn onto his feet. He made a noise of protest, but he let us haul him up, which I knew meant he probably couldn’t have stood on his own no matter how much he might have wanted to.

  “Let’s go, compadre,” I said, and he gave me another wobbly grin.

  He swayed but held his balance between us as we all trudged across the flat gray landscape. Yesterday’s haze had closed in around us again, blocking all view of anything except our path to the row of lopsided structures. Lacey walked with something between a limp and a skip in her step, her chin held high. Judith had folded her good arm across her sling. Her breath was still raspy.

  When we stepped over the threshold of the building where we’d had our last meal, Judith halted with a sharp exhale and spun around. “What the hell was that? People getting cut up, burned to death! That’s not a trial. That’s… that’s torture. What are they testing us for with that?”

  Cut up. My thumb reached for the stump where my little finger had been. It took me a moment to realize I wasn’t surprised. Why wouldn’t the Confed torture us? Why wouldn’t they run us ragged every way they could? This was our punishment for not accepting their judgment.

  Even the Champions mustn’t feel very triumphant after they made it through two more days like this. And that was just how the Confed would like it, wasn’t it? To have even the victors beaten down.

  I didn’t say any of that, though. Caution held my tongue.

  Mark had been standing in almost the same spot that Judith was now when he’d accused the Confed of brainwashing and worse. Less than an hour later, our next test had nearly killed him. Just a coincidence?

  “They must have their reasons,” Prisha said, but her voice wavered a bit.

  “They want to make sure we actually deserve the chance to keep our magic,” Finn said, sounding bleaker than I’d expected. He let go of us and immediately sank onto the floor, though he managed to make it look as if there was nothing he’d rather do more.

  “There have to be better ways to make sure of that than what we just went through,” Judith said.

  My throat tightened. If the Confed had heard Mark, they could hear her too. He’d lit up with magic before the sentries charged at him. Maybe he’d cast something earlier that had made him their target… or maybe the Confed had interfered.

  Had they heard Javi make similar comments three years ago? Had they painted a target on his back in return?

  We cut the chaff from the wheat, the examiner had said to me. They’d cut Mark away so easily. It could have been me if I’d spoken more freely.

  “We made it,” I said, wishing I had Finn’s way with words to calm Judith down. “We did the best we could. That’s all we can focus on for now.”

  “We blasted them back even harder than they blasted us,” Lacey said with a short laugh. “I wish the people back home could have seen me.”

  Her enthusiasm rankled me. “It’d be better if we hadn’t needed to ‘blast’ at all.”

  Her shoulders tensed, but then her posture deflated. With her overlarge dress drifting around her, right then she looked like the hesitant girl I’d met in the courtyard again.

  Before I could add anything that might have softened my implied criticism, Judith said, “Do you think Mark will be okay? I mean, he obviously wasn’t, but they must have magimedics on the island, right?”

  “Even if they could heal him, he failed the Exam.” Desmond scratched his elbow, his tone vacant. “They’ll burn him out. That’s how it works.”

  “If they were going to take him anyway, they could have transported him from the hallway instead of waiti
ng until we got out,” Judith said. “It wasn’t as if we were going to be able to help him either way.”

  But that would have made the test easier for the rest of us. I bit my lip.

  “Hey!” Lacey pointed to a faint glow that was creeping across the wall where the message had been. It resolved into the outline of a door, growing more defined until a knob protruded from its surface.

  She hurried forward while the rest of us hung back. Finn scrambled up before anyone could offer a hand and managed to hobble over on his own.

  As Lacey pushed on the door and it opened, I braced for the start of another test, but nothing came through the doorway except a thin wash of heat.

  Lacey beamed, peering through the doorway. “They’re bringing us back.”

  She stepped right inside. When I reached the door, I saw what she’d meant. It opened into a white-walled room like the ones we’d spent most of the first day of the Exam in, filled with bright light. Savory smells reached my nose from tables along the far wall, where a bunch of examinees was already clustered. A few examiners stood around the fringes, keeping an eye on them—and now us.

  One by one, we headed in. From its size, I thought the room might have been the one where we’d constructed our defensive ’chantments, although photos and the shelves and half the tables were gone. The remaining tables were covered with platters of food: roast chicken, pasta casserole, heaps of hamburgers, assorted salads and fruit, and bottles of juice and pop. The other examinees were already digging in, silent except for the smacking of their lips. Lacey and the rest of my group joined them.

  Hunger and queasiness twisted together inside me. I hadn’t eaten a full meal since that first night in the dorm room, but images of blistered skin and severed flesh were still too fresh in my mind. My right hand ached.

  I had to keep my strength. I had to take every opportunity the examiners gave us to fortify myself. Even if the last thing I wanted to be doing right now was enjoying a meal. I forced myself to walk over to the table, pick up a hamburger, and murmur a quick casting to check for ’chantments or toxins. One bite and then another, the meaty juices turning sour in my mouth.