Ruthless Magic Read online

  That former student was a magimedical consultant for the whole state now. A Harlem guy originally from the Manhattan-Bronx Tutorial had been appointed advisor to the mayor last month. The Confed made a little room for us when we proved ourselves worthy to their standards.

  Still, I clutched the envelope unopened as I stepped into our cramped living room.

  Mom was embroidering a blouse at the desk that doubled as a dining table when she wasn’t working. Perched between the streaks of sunlight from the narrow windows, she looked worlds away from the rest of the apartment. That impression didn’t totally disappear even when she raised her head and smiled at me. A sliver of distance remained in her eyes.

  “Was that really necessary, cariño?” she said, nodding to the window.

  She’d seen the dragon. The realization gave me an unexpected thrill.

  Ages ago, Javi and I used to come back from family trips to the local library weighed down with fantastical picture books. We’d spend the afternoon conjuring the illustrations to life while Mom and Dad applauded. Sometimes Javi had sat back with a grin, simply taking in the spectacle, but he’d never shown any resentment that he couldn’t keep up. He’d always been my best audience.

  “It felt like something I had to do,” I said. “After what…” Javi’s name caught in my throat. If Mom—and let’s be honest, Dad too—lived partly somewhere else these days, it was a place called Grief. And that was already enough my fault.

  “You know what I’ve said about showing restraint,” Mom said, but the chiding was gentle.

  That was why I never put on a show of my skills for her anymore. She hadn’t even liked me going to the Academy so often. She’d never outright discouraged me, but she hadn’t been able to completely hide her edginess either. She didn’t understand why sharing the magic mattered so much to me. How could she when she hadn’t hearkened it properly in decades?

  Her gaze fixed on the envelope in my hand. She set down the blouse. “It came.”

  “Yeah.” My grip on the envelope tightened. I wondered if she was thinking of the first time she’d seen a child of hers holding one of these.

  “You haven’t opened it yet.”

  “I will. It just... It seems so final.”

  Mom came over to rest her hand on my back. “Whatever they decide, it doesn’t mean anything about who you are,” she said firmly. “There are many paths to happiness.”

  I stiffened. “You don’t think I’ve done enough to get in?”

  “I think if anyone should be Chosen, it’s you,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean you should rest all your hopes on it. You can have a good future either way.”

  She and Dad were both Dampered. At first everything was... fuzzy, the way you can almost go deaf after you hear a very loud sound, she’d said when I’d asked her how it had felt. You know the magic is there, but you can’t make it out. After a few weeks, the fuzziness, it condenses into just a single note. You can still reach the magic through that. But the rest you can’t hearken at all.

  It was true that they’d always seemed happy enough. From what they’d told me, their talents had been relatively weak like most new-magic mages’ were, so maybe they hadn’t hoped for anything more. The magic they’d been left with was still useful.

  Mom’s talent had “condensed” into an affinity for thread and fabric that made her stitches stronger than any machine could manage. The custom-designed clothes she sold online brought in a better income than she’d gotten at the dry cleaners she used to work for. Dad’s culinary affinity hadn’t done him any professional favors, since no restaurants around here wanted to risk posting the legally mandated disclaimer for food prepared with magic—most Dulls got extra paranoid about what they put in their bodies—but I knew it meant a lot to him when we gushed over our family meals.

  Still, I had trouble imagining only being able to see one color or taste one flavor. I wouldn’t even get a choice in it. For all we knew, the Confed decided even that. Do you really think it’s a coincidence Mom and Dad got perfectly set up as the domestic help? Javier had said once.

  I wasn’t sure if his assumption had been right, but I didn’t plan to find out.

  “I know,” I said to Mom. “But I have to get in.”

  Mom put her arm right around me, tugging me closer. She wasn’t so distant that she’d missed what I hadn’t said.

  “You know Javier would have been proud of you no matter what,” she said. “We can’t change the way they think.”

  I leaned into her. “He was going to change them. That was the whole reason he— If he hadn’t wanted to make sure they chose me—”

  I choked up too much to say the rest. Javi hadn’t trusted the Confed to take me either. He’d gone into the Mages’ Exam for me. If he hadn’t been determined that I should keep all my ability, he’d have accepted being Dampered, but he’d thought if he could make Champion then he could advocate for me from within—carve out a space that their prejudices couldn’t deny me.

  When he’d died, he’d died for me.

  I was twice the mage I’d been when he’d left. I could complete the most difficult exercises in the Academy’s most advanced texts. I’d shown up for every assessment with a smile and all the politeness I had in me. What more could they want?

  “Rocío,” Mom said. I straightened up, gritted my teeth, and ripped open the envelope. The folded paper inside sprang open as I yanked it out.

  We regret to convey that Rocío Lopez has not met the requirements for admittance to the College of the North American Confederation of Mages. The timing of her scheduled Dampering is recorded below.

  Then a date, three days from now. A time, an address. I hardly saw them. I read the first sentence again, the paper creasing under my thumbs. Has not met the requirements...

  “No,” I said. “That’s not possible. No.”

  Mom took the letter from me and read it with her other hand at her temple. But she didn’t look surprised. She’d tried to warn me.

  “Is there something you knew I needed to do that you didn’t tell me?” I blurted out, my voice shaking.

  Her gaze darted up. “Oh, cariño, no,” she said. “It’s only... The Confed seems so hesitant to accept any new-magic families. I’ve started to wonder if it’s not just because we often have lesser talents—if maybe they reject those with great talents too, because they don’t trust us enough to let us keep them. I didn’t want to hold you back when I wasn’t sure, but with this… I have to think it isn’t that you didn’t meet their requirements so much as that you exceeded them too far.”

  I stared at her. “They don’t trust me? I’ve never—I would never hurt anyone. I’ve never given them one reason to worry.”

  “And Javier wouldn’t have hurt anyone either. But there are different ways of hurting. The Confederation doesn’t like differing opinions.”

  This was the most critically I’d ever heard her speak about the Confed. I was speechless for a second. “You think because Javi disagreed with the way they do things, they made it so he—”

  “No,” she said, “but... I don’t think they appreciated his intentions. Perhaps they tested him harder than the others because of that.”

  “And what about me? They’re going to Damper me for being good at magic, no matter how well I’ve followed their rules, just because I might think some of those rules are stupid? As if my opinions somehow make me dangerous?”

  Even as I said the words, I thought of the dragon I’d cast at the school. It had been beautiful to me, an act of art. Would some people who walked by think it was scary? My gut clenched.

  I’d be back there in ten days if I let the Confed Damper me, mixed in with the Dulls as if I were a regular student, attending only one class a week with Mr. Jones to help me adapt to my restricted talent. And then what? I’d live the rest of my life hollowed out and scraping by?

  No. There was so much I’d wanted to do. A strangled noise escaped me.

  “It’ll be okay,” Mom sa
id, reaching for me again, but I didn’t want to be comforted into acceptance.

  “It will,” I said. “I don’t have to let them do this.”

  The color leached from her tan face. “Rocío, no.”

  “Why not?” I said. “If I’m so good that they’re scared of me, I’ve got to be good enough to make it through their Exam, haven’t I?”

  “Is it worth the risk?” she said. “After what happened to your brother—”

  “You just said you think they tested him harder. I can handle that.” I motioned wildly at the living room—the room where, aside from hastily eaten meals, I’d hardly spent more than five minutes in the last three years. “What have I been working so hard for if I can’t handle it?”

  She grasped my arm. “Please, Rocío. Nothing good ever comes from arguing with them.”

  “I’m not going to argue. I’ll be taking the opportunity they freely offer everyone. ‘A second chance’—isn’t that what they say? I’ll take that chance and prove they’ve got no reason to—”

  The hum of magic that was always around me shifted, and a little tremor ran through it, a stirring of intent. My skin tightened. Neither of us was casting. Dad was off at work.

  Mom’s fears trickled into me. Were they, someone from the Confed, watching me to see how I’d respond to the letter?

  I backed up a step. Mom’s brow knit. She wouldn’t be able to hearken that small shift, but she could tell something was wrong.

  “I need a minute,” I said. “I need—” I needed to be somewhere I could think this through without her resistance, without Javi watching me from the family photo over the couch, without whatever unknown person evaluating my reaction.

  A childhood lullaby tripped onto my lips. “Quiere que lo lleven a pasear en coche.” With each word, I pulled at the magic around me until the hum rose into a roar. The room around me blurred. My lungs hitched, an electric crackle stung my eardrums, and in a blink, I found myself elsewhere.

  My legs swayed for a second before I caught my balance. I stood on a rocky shoreline. Water lapped at the pebbles a few inches from my sneakers.

  A putrid sewage smell arrived with the humid breeze. To my left, a bridge stretched across the water to another shore maybe half a mile distant, where stark white walls rose from flat concrete.

  My mouth fell open. I might have laughed if I hadn’t felt so sick.

  This was why you never performed a major casting when you weren’t thinking straight. I hadn’t told the magic where I wanted to go, only that I wanted to be away, so it had brought me to the place that had been on my mind right before I’d cast.

  I was looking at Rikers Island, site of the Mages’ Exam for the last twenty-six years. The place where my brother had died.

  It used to hold a prison, Javi had told me. After the Unveiling, the Confed had wanted a place to conduct business away from non-magical society, and the government had given the island over when asked. The mages had renovated the site to meet their needs, but it still looked cold. Cruel. I wasn’t sure what they used the place for other than the Exam, but I wouldn’t want to work there.

  Pebbles rasped behind me. I jerked around.

  A guy was standing several feet down the shoreline, where the rocks met trees. He must have already been there when I’d arrived, but he didn’t look concerned by my sudden appearance. Now he meandered toward me, his shoulders slouched in the thin gray overcoat he wore over a T-shirt and jean shorts.

  At first, because of his posture and the unevenness of his gait, I thought he was at least middle-aged. Then he stopped and lifted his head, and I noticed two things at once: the little sigil like a curved X on his left temple, blacker than his dark brown skin, and the familiar shape of his features.

  “Sean?” I said. He’d been part of our tutorial class—two years ahead of Javi and five ahead of me, so we’d only been in the same group for a couple years in elementary school. But he and Javi had been friendly.

  Sean had declared for the Exam too, and the result was etched on his skin: Burnout. Where once he’d hearkened magic, now he’d find only a void—not even the single note Dampering would have left him with.

  He looked at me, his eyes twitching as if he couldn’t quite place me. “Rocío,” he produced after a long silence.

  “Yeah. I—” I was going to say it was good to see him, but it wasn’t really, not when he looked as unsteady as he did right now. “What are you doing here?”

  He shrugged and glanced toward the island. “This day, sometimes I just... I need to see it.” His gaze slid back to me. “You got your letter.”

  I nodded, fresh pain slicing through me. “Dampered.”

  He grimaced. “So you’re going to declare?”

  I took a breath and hesitated. Looking at the island with its impenetrable blankness, I’d lost the certainty I’d felt in my living room. The Confed hadn’t even been able to send back a body for Javi’s funeral, whatever it was that happened to him.

  “Don’t!” Sean said—so abruptly I startled.

  “What?” I said.

  “Don’t,” he said again. He wasn’t even looking at me. I had the weird impression he was talking to the island. “Don’t. Stay away.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What do they do there?”

  All kinds of rumors passed down from the tutorial’s older students to the younger. Traps that would torture you, battles with creatures we’d been taught didn’t really exist. No one actually knew, though. Except the people who’d been there.

  “It’s...” Sean shuddered so hard the hem of his coat flapped against his knees. “I’m not allowed to talk about it.”

  “If I just had some idea—”

  Sean shook his head, violently enough that my voice dried up. He took a step toward the water, and his expression softened. “I was so close,” he rasped.

  His hand balled at his side. He spun on his heel and stalked away. A prickle crept up my spine as I watched him go.

  Don’t.

  But Sean hadn’t been that much more skilled than Javi, and he was warning me after five years without speaking to me, without any idea what my abilities were. If he’d been so close, then I had to be able to make it.

  Javi had been willing to fight for me. How could I not fight for myself? I could either put myself in the Confed’s hands for five days or let them destroy every hope I’d had for what the rest of my life might hold.

  Is it worth it? Mom had asked.

  Yes. It was worth everything.

  My feet felt suddenly steady against the ground. The same lyrics that had transported me from the apartment rose to my lips. As I sang them out in a rush, the magic whipped around me. The landscape blurred. With another crackle, I was stumbling next to Mom’s desk on my living room’s scuffed parquet floor. Mom flinched in surprise where she was standing near the door.

  “Rocío,” she said, but I was looking at my letter. She’d left it lying on the desk. There was no point in talking. I’d only draw out her pain if I let her think she might change my mind.

  I snatched up the paper and flipped it open.

  “Rocío Lopez declares for the Mages’ Exam.”

  Chapter Three

  Finn

  Sneaking out of one’s house was not the most dignified act, but that Sunday morning, circumstances had placed dignity rather low on my list of priorities.

  I crept down the stairs, foot after careful foot. “Tacerent perdidit silentium,” I whispered, conducting the magic around me to mute the vibrations in the wood.

  Mom’s shoes tapped across the floor as she paced in her office. Dad was out, after a near twenty-four-hour marathon of arguing and cajoling and lecturing me. He was negotiating a last-minute audience with the Circle. It didn’t seem to matter that I’d informed him I wasn’t backing down.

  He’d told me not to leave the house but hadn’t taken any measures to prevent me. On one hand, I appreciated the easier escape. On the other, it rankled to think I’d questioned my paren
ts’ authority so seldom in the past sixteen years that it hadn’t occurred to them that simply saying I should stay put wouldn’t be enough.

  On a third hand, which felt as if it were clamped uncomfortably around my gut, he’d trusted me, and I was breaking that trust. I avoided picturing what his face would look like if he got home before I did and found me gone.

  I turned the handle on the front door slowly, repeating my chant. A twinge shot through my nerves, and the magic slipped from my grasp. I exhaled, inhaled, and recited the line with all the intent I could muster, modulating it to the quiver in the air. The hinges shifted like butter; the door glided open without so much as a squeak.

  At Prisha’s brownstone, the housekeeper let me in. Pree’s older sister was hollering across the hall to some sibling I couldn’t see. “Ten more—beat that!”

  I ascended the staircase through a blast of air conditioning. I was a familiar enough presence in the house that no one gave me a second glance.

  Prisha’s bedroom encompassed the entire front half of the top floor. The door was open. I peeked inside.

  “I told you not to come,” she said, striding over.

  “And I told you I was coming anyway.”

  She huffed and crossed her arms, but her eyes darted away from me before returning. “You can’t change my mind. I’m doing this. And I really don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  I hadn’t expected her to be quite so defensive, not with me. I’d worked out precisely how I’d spill the news, but in the face of her glare, my plans crumpled.

  “I’m not here to change your mind,” I said. “I’m here to tell you I’ve declared too.”

  It appeared I’d accidentally spoken a foreign language—though I didn’t know any Prisha didn’t know as well. She looked at me with utter blankness. Then her eyes widened.