Ruthless Magic Page 6

  I slipped out of the alleyway, passed the bridge, and headed back to the new-magic side. The presence gave another tug, but there was nowhere else I could go. Maybe it wanted me inside one of those buildings?

  Or maybe it was a conjured trick and meant nothing at all.

  It’d been silly, imagining that feeling could somehow be Javi. But how could I not wish he were here with me? When the mages finally appeared, I’d find someone to ask directly about him. There must be records of how people died. I didn’t think the examiners could fault a sister for wanting to know. At least then I’d have some kind of answer, whether anything remained of him here or not.

  Several of the other old-magic kids had pulled out bottled water, and Mohawk was gulping from a canteen. Even the blond boy’s smile was lopsided as he swiped at his forehead with the back of his pale arm. Two of his friends had stepped to the side in the midst of an argument, their voices harsh but too low for me to make out.

  “This is ridiculous,” someone snapped.

  Axton clapped his hands together in the middle of our group. “All right,” he said. “It’s time to show the Confed one mage here can do more than sit with his thumb up his butt.” He walked up to the door on our side.

  My back stiffened. “What are you going to do?” I said.

  He flexed his shoulders and cracked his knuckles. “Nothing’s happening while we stand around. I’ll bet they’re waiting for us to smash our way in.”

  “They said not to cast,” I protested.

  “To cut out the people with no initiative.” He raised his hand. “I’m not afraid to show what I can do.”

  Alarm jabbed through my gut. “Don’t.” I stepped forward to grab his elbow. “I really think—”

  “Get off me!” he snapped, shoving me away.

  I stumbled back but avoided bumping Lacey, who was hovering nearby. Axton intoned a quick lyric under his breath and flicked his fingers. Whatever effect he’d intended, it was swallowed by the black surface with a faint sizzle. Axton flinched. Then he narrowed his eyes. Spitting out a second line, he hurled his hand toward the door.

  The thrum of magic hit the door with a faint crackle and a smell like burnt plastic. The door shuddered. A triumphant grin split Axton’s face just as the thrum heightened to a screech and a flare of magic rebounded straight at him.

  The blaze sliced across Axton’s forehead and dissolved. He stood there, still and silent, his mouth half open. A thin reddish line formed just above his eyebrows. Then a trickle of blood seeped over the line’s edge and down, and his eyes rolled up. His body crumpled to the ground.

  Lacey’s squeak broke the silence. “What the hell?” someone shouted.

  I backed up a step, my legs wobbly. My fingers found Mom’s sunburst charm and clutched it against my chest.

  The growing babble of frantic voices fell away. The door Axton had struck was sliding open. A woman in the gray uniform that marked her as an examiner stood on the threshold. She looked down at Axton’s body, and her lips pressed tight. Then she raised her eyes to the rest of us.

  “It is always regrettable when an examinee fails to heed our instructions. May this be a reminder to the fifty-six of you remaining that every action you take has consequences. I extend my congratulations to you on passing your first test. Please come in. Your fallen colleague will be attended to by the medics before his burning out.”

  I exhaled in a rush. He wasn’t dead, just unconscious. He still lay between us and the door, blood seeping over his temple. All the arrogance had drained from his slack expression.

  People shifted, but no one moved forward. I glanced around. A lot of my fellow examinees were watching me. Shaleigh was staring.

  I’d spoken up and tried to stop Axton. I didn’t know what they’d made of that gesture, but I’d gotten their attention. My forehead itched, as if there were a target there too.

  Javi had faced all this and worse. The Confed could try to shock us all it wanted—I wasn’t backing down.

  I set my shoulders and walked around Axton to the doorway.

  Chapter Five

  Finn

  Faced with the all-but-dead body of a guy I’d been arguing with just a short while ago, I felt the urge to reevaluate some of my recent life choices.

  Our swarm of examinees edged toward the doorway to the Exam building. A couple of the novices ahead of me swiveled, started circling back, and then changed their minds and went forward again. No one wanted to remark on the situation with the examiner watching us, but a current of unease swept around us all.

  I doubted the guy had endeared himself to anyone with his eagerness for a fight, but he’d been one of us. Now he was sprawled unconscious because of a single warning ignored. The Exam had barely started.

  Blood was still trickling down his forehead when I reached his body. Where in Hades were the magimedics?

  The answer came to me as quickly as the question: The examiners were strategically delaying. They wanted us to look our possible fate in the face, literally. The whole scenario out here had been a setup, hadn’t it? They’d never intended to open the door before one of us broke and resorted to casting.

  They must do this every year.

  Margo’s face yesterday swam up in my mind, the tremor in her voice alongside it. Could you use that weapon on another living being, Finn? Do you really want to become someone who has?

  A chill ran down my back. The rod lay in the pocket of my khakis now, a slim weight against my hip. I’d been prepared for brutally difficult tests but not for brutal callousness from our examiners—from the Confed’s own mages. Was this what my sister had tried to warn me of, that I hadn’t understood even with her demonstration?

  In front of me, Prisha pressed her mouth flat and strode toward the entrance. I jerked my gaze from the fallen body to her back, to the tumble of her glossy black hair against her violet blouse.

  I was here now. We’d do whatever we could to protect each other—I knew that much. I couldn’t let myself dwell on anything else.

  I propelled myself after her. The examiner tipped her head to each of us in turn. I tramped after Prisha several paces down a hall that was as unrelentingly white as the buildings outside. A waft of air conditioning cooled the sweat on my skin. It left a faintly chemical aftertaste in the back of my mouth.

  Prisha’s arm brushed mine, her baby finger curling around my own. I squeezed hers back. Pinky swear. It was a childish gesture, carried over from when we were kids—when all we’d needed to fend off were bullies like Callum or a particularly merciless teacher—but it spoke of a promise all the same.

  I’m here with you.

  Another mage in a gray examiner uniform started to lead our line down the hall. Someone was sniffling—the guy’s girlfriend, I suspected: that waifish girl in a dress like a nightgown. I couldn’t imagine how wretched she must feel. At least to the rest of us he was a stranger.

  We turned a corner and stepped into a room that held six rows of tall cubicles. The examiner directed us each to one.

  The moment I sat down, silence descended over me with a quiver. The slate-gray sides of the cubicle blocked all view of my companions. I might as well have been alone in the room, just me and the staccato beating of my heart.

  A stack of ivory paper and a ballpoint pen appeared on my previously bare desk. A flat voice spoke into the bubble of silence. “Write down every detail you can recall about your fellow examinees and the interactions you’ve had thus far,” it said. “When you have recorded everything, tap the wall three times.”

  I exhaled and picked up the pen. This task I could do without much trouble.

  I began with Prisha and the others from our academy, Doria and Paulo. Aside from Callum, we’d all gravitated together on arriving, but our chatter had been rather mindless. The rhythmic rasp of the nib scraping the paper carried me on to the examinees from the other four academics I’d exchanged introductions with, and then to those who’d kept more distance from us—mostly tutorial
students, I guessed.

  This exercise put them at a disadvantage. We Academy students had the benefit of knowing the others from our own school well, whereas the tutorial classes were so geographically scattered, I doubted any of the new-magic examinees had known each other at all. It truly was unfortunate for the magical community that there was no way to predict where new talents might arise. Newcomers couldn’t always simply move to the major centers the way Prisha’s family had.

  The tutorial students might have an edge of another sort, though. Their inherent abilities might be weaker on average than those in old-magic families, but rumor had it they exchanged methods of twisting magic on the streets that the Confed disdained to acknowledge.

  Maybe there was a new-magic technique my teachers had never considered that could strengthen my connection to the magic. I could explore that possibility with my assigned mentor… if I got through this Exam with my talent intact.

  When I’d filled several pages with tight scrawl, I tapped the cubicle wall with the end of my pen. A spark lit in the air in front of me. I stood up, and the spark careened toward the doorway like a rolling marble. Some of the desks I passed were vacant, while the others were shielded by a shadow that hid whoever remained.

  The spark led me down the hall outside into a larger room with a high ceiling spotted with domed light fixtures. A ring of cubicles surrounded a central platform. There, ten mages in examiner uniforms watched from leather armchairs.

  These cubicles had lower sidewalls and, unlike the others, opened in the front as well as the back. As my spark stopped at an empty station, I spotted Prisha standing in a cubicle several over, most of her head visible above the partitions. Her brow creased, but otherwise she looked no worse for wear. A clenching in my chest released.

  Callum was still with us as well, five spots to my right, his mouth bent in a characteristic frown as he scratched his russet buzz cut. Doria stood a few more cubicles beyond him, her face even sallower than usual. The boy with the mohawk had taken a station a couple over from Prisha. I didn’t see Paulo at all, but a few cubicles still stood empty—or he could be on the other side of the ring, in one of the handful obscured by the examiners’ platform. The waifish girl with her lank hair and red-rimmed eyes drifted into her position.

  The same flat instructor’s voice I’d heard in the other room spoke from somewhere above.

  “You will now display basic magical skills for our evaluation. For each concept given, cast a conjuring or ’chantment representing the best of your capabilities. We begin now.” A pause. “Send a message.”

  I sucked in a breath, and my mind went blank. With demonstrations in school, I’d always been able to prepare ahead of time. There were ten mages watching the lot of us. Even as I hesitated, someone across the way shot a conjured paper into one of the examiners’ hands, where it bloomed open like a flower. Another was sketching letters in the air with streaks of light.

  It wouldn’t be enough to appear merely competent. I needed to catch the examiners’ notice if I wanted to pass.

  I needed to cast something before they moved on to the next concept. I groped for an idea, any idea, and grasped at the first that came to me. Go big, literally. With a few intoned words at a brisk tempo, a vibration flowed from my throat into the magic. It formed a sign over my head the width of the cubicle, the word HELLO emblazoned on it.

  The examiner nearest me, a woman about Margo’s age with a hijab draped loosely over her black hair, flicked her eyes toward my sign and away. I cringed inwardly. That had been too big, too gauche, no doubt. The Confed valued subtlety alongside power.

  “Transformation,” the voice said.

  An image popped into my head. I didn’t let myself question it, just reached for a poetic phrase of friendly regard. As I pitched my voice to harmonize with the whisper of energy around me, the arm of the mage’s chair wriggled—and then stilled again as my tone went flat. I repeated the verse con forza, ignoring the desperate thump of my pulse.

  There. The chair arm bent upward, molding into the wrist I was picturing, a slender hand at its end. I trained all my attention on the memory of papery dry skin etched with faint lines of age—oh, it was my grandmother’s hand—and rolled out the last few syllables of my casting. The hand offered itself for the examiner to shake.

  The mage met my eyes this time and nodded with a quick smile as she released the ’chantment. My arms fell to my sides. That was better.

  Keeping up that standard wasn’t the easiest undertaking. The boy at my left was fond of flash, and no matter what words the instructor called out, I had something flaring at the edge of my vision. A little to my right, Callum had discovered he could turn the distractive element of the test into a strategy. When we were asked to produce fire, the sparks from his flames leapt over the wall of his cubicle, leaving his neighbor smacking her singed hair. At a request for weather, he sent his cloud sleeting over her.

  My jaw tightened as I conjured my own funnel of wind to dance around the examiner—thank the Fates the last text I’d pored over had contained an entire section on air currents—but none of the mages protested.

  They hadn’t said we needed to keep our castings to ourselves. Evidently good sportsmanship wasn’t in the rules.

  An examiner appeared behind one of the boys across from me, touched his shoulder, and sent him away. The mage stalked around the circle toward me and then tapped Doria. O gods, she was out already too?

  We weren’t exactly friends. Doria had barely scraped by all through our Academy years, and she’d compensated for her practical deficiencies by becoming the self-declared expert on every aspect of magical history and theory, which hadn’t been a winning quality in social situations. Still, she was one of the few familiar faces here. I couldn’t say I believed that she deserved to have even her slight talent wiped away.

  The examiner strolled on, continuing my way. My voice broke in the middle of a lyric. The scent I’d been conjuring began to wisp away but returned as I forced the next words out. The mage padded past me.

  I trained my gaze in a different direction and found myself regarding the girl who’d tried to stop that boy from breaking the no-magic rule in the courtyard a couple hours ago.

  She was what Prisha would have called “cute-pretty,” maybe—pleasant enough to look at but far from striking. Average height, average build, plain olive-green T-shirt and faded jeans, a wavy shoulder-length bob as dark a brown as her deep-set eyes and rather pointy features. A sunburst trinket glinted softly below her collarbone. Everything about her was subdued—other than her voice when she’d raised it with the guy outside.

  She’d been the only one of us who’d spoken at all when he’d been working himself up to his catastrophe. If he’d listened to her, she’d have saved him from burning out.

  Her castings were quick and deliberate, but each contained just enough of a flourish to encourage me to keep watching. For concealment she unfurled a swath of shadow over her cubicle with velvet smoothness. For illumination she cast out a globe of light with a pearl-like sheen that gleamed brighter when the examiner reached toward it. Most of the time she looked absorbed and serious, but I kept catching a flicker of a smile. She enjoyed performing this medley.

  As I watched her in glances between my own conjurings, an ache formed inside me. O muse of magic, what I wouldn’t give for skill like that.

  The circling examiner was still picking off those who’d failed. The neighbor Callum had worked his machinations on was the next tapped. The mage slowed as he approached Prisha, and my gut lurched before he stopped at the boy beside her.

  Finally, the examiners on the platform stood. I let my rough voice fall silent. The instructor overhead spoke. “You will break for a short lunch.”

  A glass of water, a chicken salad sandwich, and an apple appeared on my desk. I drained half the water in one extended gulp. Fatigue shivered through my joints and pinched the bridge of my nose. I rubbed my eyes as if I could wipe away the momentary diz
ziness.

  I understood magical exhaustion in theory, but I’d never pushed myself far enough to truly experience it. I’d never had to pull off this many castings in so short a time. The energy that reverberated through our bodies wore on our nerves, and extended focus could strain the mind. The effects crept up on you faster the harder you had to work, which meant I was especially fatigued.

  We still had half the day left. I needed to pace myself without downplaying my abilities, or I might not make it to the end on my feet.

  I’d scarcely set down my apple core when the man who’d sent the failed examinees away announced it was time to move on. He ushered us farther down the hall. I fell back to join Prisha.

  “How are you holding up?” I murmured.

  “It isn’t so bad,” she said, but I recognized tension in her voice. She swiped her hand across her face. “Two tests down. I’m managing. You worry about yourself first, okay?”

  “On it,” I said.

  Then we were directed into a room even larger than the last but with a low ceiling that felt instantly oppressive. The rectangular light panels gave off a low buzzing sound. A few rows of gleaming wooden tables stood on the linoleum floor, and the air smelled of a recent polish. One of the stark white walls was covered with framed photographs. Another held a wide steel shelving unit.

  I counted the figures around me. We were down to thirty-nine examinees. And Paulo was definitely not among us. He’d always been swift to leap into action but slow on the uptake. I guessed he’d drawn a blank in reporting observations from the courtyard.

  Not an impressive showing for the Manhattan Academy so far.

  “Until you have completed this task, you will not speak to any other examinee,” the voice above instructed.

  My lips clamped together.

  “As you all know, we and our allies face a number of threats both conventional and magical from hostile parties throughout the world,” our invisible instructor continued. “With the inspiration and objects you find here, consider the most deadly foe you can imagine and imbue one item with the magic you believe would best overcome that foe in time to prevent an attack. You must complete this task within four hours.”