Ruthless Magic

  “Group Three, together to the end,” Desmond said with a nervous chuckle. “Fantastic!”

  Not all of Group Three was here. Lacey was loitering near the doorway. Based on the smudges under her eyes, it appeared she’d slept worse than I had, but her expression was firm and her head high. She caught me considering her, took in the whole group of us, and jerked her eyes away. Did she assume we were purposefully excluding her?

  “Let me round up the straggler,” I said.

  Lacey pretended not to notice me approaching until I was a few feet away, but her shoulders tensed. I halted, drawing up the right words.

  “It’s a tough decision,” I said.

  She smiled thinly. “Not really. I can’t go home burned out. So I’m staying here.”

  I can’t go home. I’d overheard her saying something like that to herself during one of the earlier tests.

  “The guy you were with,” I hazarded, recalling our first morning in the courtyard. “He pushed you around a lot, didn’t he?”

  “A lot of people did,” Lacey said. “But when I’m the only one with magic, they won’t dare. Not for a second. No one’s going to treat me like I’m nothing again.”

  She stared at me, all defiance, as if she suspected I might try to diminish her.

  I shifted back on my heels. “We’re all going on too,” I said, motioning to the others. “It seemed to work out well before, all of us sticking together.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Not everyone liked how I cast.”

  I didn’t follow what she meant. Had I missed something when I’d passed out?

  “I’m sure we’d be glad to have you on our side all the same,” I said.

  She didn’t answer, but when I turned to head back, she drifted along behind me. I’d scarcely reached the rest of the group when silence snapped through the room.

  “The next stage begins now,” a piercingly clear voice announced. Examiner Lancaster, her hair glinting silver above her examiner robes, had materialized in the middle of the room. “I assume everyone remaining wishes to be here?”

  When no one spoke or moved, she nodded. A door appeared in the wall behind her.

  “You will enter the next stage in your original groups,” she said. “Group One, come forward.”

  We all moved forward then. Could we catch a glimpse of what lay beyond that door before we had to go through?

  Desmond ambled closest, his gaze fixed on the interplay of glowing light and shadow around the door’s outline. As the four members of Group One marched over, Callum sauntered past me too, flipping his fork in his hand.

  “You said there’s no magic allowed before we go in there,” he said to Lancaster. “Are there any other rules we’re supposed to be following right now?”

  The examiner gave him a measured look. “As long as you follow the rules that have been spoken, you’ll face no punishment.”

  He nodded in such a serene manner that my back stiffened. I peered past the first group as they filed through the doorway, but all I made out around them was darkness.

  Lancaster paused for a beat after the door closed, and then said, “Group Two.”

  A boy I didn’t know, so bulky with muscle he looked as though he’d barely fit through the doorway, started forward. Callum’s sole remaining companion, apparently. My former classmate trailed behind the bulky guy, his narrowed eyes sliding over the gathered crowd. They settled on Desmond, who was still studying the door.

  Hades, no. I wasn’t certain what I needed to warn Desmond of, only that I needed to. “Des—”

  Callum had already lunged, ducking and lashing out with the fork. Desmond didn’t catch the movement at his periphery until it was too late. The other boy slammed the metal tines into his calf. They punctured the thin fabric of Desmond’s slacks and burrowed into his flesh.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Rocío

  I threw myself forward, catching Desmond’s arm as he stumbled, and Callum pushed away to bolt through the open doorway.

  Desmond steadied himself, his lips pressed tight, and glanced down at his leg. The fork protruded from his calf. He braced himself and batted it off him. Blood soaked through his pant leg.

  I was about to check the wound when Examiner Lancaster said, without missing a beat, “Group Three.” The door that had closed behind Callum opened again.

  Desmond limped forward, and the rest of us hurried after him into whatever waited for us in the second-last stage of the Exam.

  The moment we stepped through the doorway, all signs of the room behind us vanished. Thick hedges loomed on either side of us and behind, where the door should have been. The dark green brambles climbed nearly ten feet toward the hazy gray sky. A narrow passage stretched out ahead.

  We were alone. The door must have taken the other groups someplace else.

  “Hold on just a second,” Desmond said. He hunkered down on the ground, which was the same gray spongy stuff as the Exam area before.

  I knelt beside him.

  “Leave it,” he said sharply but quietly. “I can handle this, Rocío.”

  My face heated. He was the one with the most healing practice, after all. I eased back a step. “I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t look at me as he pulled up his pant leg. “Don’t treat me like I can’t take care myself, all right? I’ve been hurt worse than this. I get by just as well as any of you.”

  He murmured a few words over the pricks of red that shone wetly against his dark skin, and the wounds closed over. It didn’t look like Callum had stabbed the fork in deep enough to do any major damage.

  Desmond straightened up a little tentatively and turned to survey our surroundings. I would have missed the additional subtle rhythm he tapped out on his thigh if I hadn’t watched for it. He’d been compensating for his sight all along with no help from me.

  “I apologize on behalf of the Manhattan Academy,” Finn said. “The Confed should have burned Callum out to begin with.”

  A lump formed in my throat. “Why would they?” I said. “That kind of guy is what they want here. They want people who can be cutthroat and calculating.”

  “But working for them,” Judith said. “You can’t be a good soldier unless you can follow orders. He’s only looking out for himself.”

  “He managed to stay inside the rules while he was doing it,” Desmond said. He reached toward the hedge and yanked his fingers back with a wince.

  I peered at the brambles. They weren’t real plant life but barbs of greenish metal, twisted to mimic thorns. A thick coppery smell wafted off of them.

  “Well, let’s get moving,” Prisha said.

  There wasn’t anything else to do, so we set off down the passage.

  “You know, it can’t have always been like this,” Finn said after a minute. “The Exam, I mean. They tested people before the Unveiling too. There wouldn’t have been any magical special ops division back then.”

  The path widened by a couple feet, and Prisha drew up beside me. “It was convenient,” she said with a breeziness that felt forced. “There was a history of letting people opt to be tested rather than go for Dampering. After the Unveiling, it would have been easy to adapt it for a purpose like this.”

  “I guess they had to keep it a secret,” Lacey said. “Making people into magical assassins or whatever—that’s got to be against some law.”

  But the Confed did it anyway. Because they wanted to be so involved in responding to threats from other countries? Or, as Finn had suggested, because they were afraid that if they weren’t, the Dulls would decide we were too much of a threat to live alongside them?

  “I wonder how long they’ve been using the Exam this way even after the Unveiling,” I said. “Was it always like this, starting from when they took over Rikers Island, or did it... I don’t know, evolve as things got worse internationally?”

  No one answered. None of us knew.

  The path split off to the left, a tighter passage rambling away from us. Judith craned he
r neck to look down it.

  “Which way do we go?” she said.

  “Let’s keep straight,” Prisha said. “Follow the main path as long as we can.”

  “I don’t know why the Confed didn’t just round up all the bright talents into a special program when we were kids,” Desmond remarked. “Call it the School for Gifted Youngsters. I’d have been jumping to sign up.”

  “They don’t want the bright talents,” Prisha said. “They send the Champions off into situations where some get killed. And if they were training a whole bunch of kids for years and years, people would start asking questions. It’s easier to make the best of what they get when people declare, I’d guess.”

  The desperate novices, the families who no longer hoped for better, like I’d thought last night.

  “They’re looking for a lot of different talents,” Judith put in. “They want people who are strong physically—able to endure a lot. Páthei máthos.” Her right hand brushed over her sling. “They want us to be good with offensive and defensive castings.”

  “Observational skills,” Finn added. “The first test. They were checking how alert we are to our surroundings.”

  “And how well we follow the rules,” Desmond said. “You break one, you get burned.”

  That was what they’d be watching for with me, I guessed. They’d already known I had power, and I’d proven beyond a doubt I could use it destructively. My skin twitched at the memory of smashing through the sentries.

  I’d meant what I’d said to Finn at breakfast. I was going to find a way to get us through the rest of this Exam without anyone getting hurt. The examiners couldn’t fault me for that—but they also couldn’t think I was any kind of danger to them.

  I had to balance the scales after what I’d done to those unknown guards, after I’d let Mark almost die on my watch.

  “Hmm,” Finn said, and I looked up to see the walls ahead of us had converged into another hedge-like barrier. “It’s a hedge maze.” He addressed the sky. “This test could do with a little more originality!”

  Prisha elbowed him, and he gave her his crooked grin. “Since they didn’t supply us with a ball of thread to chart our travels,” she said, “we’ll have to mark the paths we’ve tried so we don’t go in circles.”

  We made our way back to the last branch. Prisha tried to etch an X on the ground with a lilted verse, but the gray surface only quivered and stilled, remaining as blank as before. She frowned.

  “Maybe you’re thinking too small.” Lacey rubbed her hands together. “Why are we letting some walls get in our way?”

  She rattled off a casting and thrust her hands toward the hedge beside her. A blast of energy, invisible but powerful enough that it crackled in the air, walloped the brambles. They hardly trembled. The metallic smell in the air thickened.

  Lacey raised her hands again.

  “Stop,” I said. “That’s enough.”

  She gave me a flat look. “There’s no rule against breaking the walls.”

  “It’s not working,” I said with a wave toward the hedge. “Anyway, we shouldn’t just... throw magic around trying to destroy things, not like that. We’ve got to be smart about it.”

  She didn’t answer, just stared back at me. Something about her expression reminded me abruptly of Axton, or like when she’d laughed that first night in the dorm, as if she were a little loca herself.

  How many years of intent had she pent up while she tried to avoid provoking him?

  A whirring rustle trickled over the top of the hedge, and all our heads jerked up. The sound rose and ebbed, leaving my skin jittering.

  “Well, that’s not at all ominous,” Finn said. “I feel it would be a good idea to keep going. Isn’t there some other trick to mazes, like you always turn right and eventually you’ll get to the end? Or maybe it’s left?”

  “Either should work as long as you stick to the same rule,” Desmond said.

  Prisha nodded. “Then onward!”

  Our new path split into three after less than a minute, so we took the left again. After a couple turns, we hit another dead end.

  The creepy-crawly sound continued to drift over the walls, and a tremor shook the ground. I braced my feet, trying not to wonder how much it would hurt to fall into the brambles beside me.

  Lacey walked a little ahead of me as we hurried on to the next branch. She rubbed her forearm, where her bruises had faded to a faint greenish brown. Finn would have known what to say, how to smooth over the awkwardness I’d created.

  I pushed myself faster to catch up. “You’ve been helping us a lot,” I said. “I’m sure the examiners have been impressed.” I doubted they’d expected much from her at first glance either.

  She lifted her head higher. “It wasn’t my idea to come,” she said. “But I’m glad I did. I didn’t really want to lose my magic. And now I can do this my way.”

  The ground shuddered again, and Desmond grabbed Judith before she could stumble into the hedge.

  “Thanks,” she said, looking a bit flushed. Then her brow knit. “This might be a weird question, but does anyone else think the magic feels a little... off?”

  When I focused on the hum in the air, I did feel a twitching in it that I hadn’t noticed before. Maybe echoing my nerves, twitching with apprehension?

  As if noticing me noticing it, the now-familiar presence in the magic slid around me, embracing me gently but firmly.

  “I haven’t felt anything strange,” Finn said, and Prisha shook her head.

  “Same as usual to me,” Desmond said, looking thoughtful.

  The thought of trying to explain the presence and the times it had come to me before made me tense up. I’d be the one sounding loca.

  “It’s probably just me being oversensitive,” Judith said before I could decide whether to mention it. “My teachers were always saying I tune in too close.”

  “That sounds like it should be a good thing,” Desmond said.

  “Not so much if any little shift in the energy distracts you from what you’re casting,” Judith replied.

  What I felt was more than just a little shift, though. During that test yesterday, it had been nearly constricting. Surely the examiners wouldn’t allow the magic to act like this if it wasn’t some type of clue?

  Or a trick to distract us from what we really needed to see.

  The rustling heightened in pitch with an erratic series of clicks, and the six of us drew closer together without speaking. As we walked on, the ground started to rock, as if the entire maze were being carried on the waves of the ocean.

  Maybe it was. We could have walked beyond Rikers Island by now.

  We turned another corner, taking another left-hand branch. Lacey drifted to the front of the group again, her arms rigid at her sides. I flexed my shoulders, trying to release the tension building inside me. An eerie creaking rose up, like ice on the verge of cracking. It softened again. Silence fell.

  The hedge ahead of us burst open in a shower of shards.

  We all ducked backward, our arms flying up to shield our faces. Sharp little shreds of bramble tore at my skin from hand to elbow.

  A roar echoed through the maze, and a stench rolled over me, putrid as bagged garbage left to bake in the sun. I stared past my bleeding arm at the mountain of a creature, taller even than the hedges, that was lurching through the opening it had smashed.

  In that first glimpse, my eyes caught on heels, wrists, knees, and torsos, all jumbled together in one giant humanoid form. Was it just one being, or was it a mass of figures charging through the maze together?

  The thing swung to face us. Dios mío, it was all one creature. One creature made up of dozens of pieces of others melded together along rippled pink seams. The thing’s fingers were twisted legs, its limbs were built out of thighs and shoulders with joints of battered heads. A mishmash of body parts melted into one another across its heaving chest. Its eyes were hands opening and closing as if clapping in a horrible heap of a face. Broken
bones protruded like teeth from its raw red “mouth.”

  Judith screamed, and the magic contracted around me, trembling against my skin with a horror that matched mine. We scrambled backward down the passage.

  The thing swiped at Lacey. She leapt out of the way, and its mess of a hand only grazed her hair. My mouth opened, but the words to speak a casting caught in my throat with that stench.

  Was that the only option we had? Just smash this thing apart?

  The creature bellowed, barreling toward us. The magic clutched me tighter. A lyric slipped from my lips—to push it back, or get it away from us at least. I had to protect us, whatever I did.

  The magic shuddered with my shove, as if sticking against my intent. The thing hardly stumbled. My gaze fixed on a head with blank staring eyes that looked almost like Mark’s, fused into the middle of the creature’s nightmarish chest. My breath stuttered. No, no, this was all wrong.

  Beside me, other voices were shouting out castings. Lacey glanced back at me. Whatever she saw in me in that instant made her spin back toward the monster with a hoarse chuckle and belt out a lyric. Her voice seared through the air, and the magic rippled with it.

  A shudder passed through the creature. Then it split open with a ball of fire that seemed to eat it from the inside out.

  Its immense corpse crashed to the ground, flaming. Lacey swiveled back toward us. The emotion in her face, so stark and wild, made my breath stop. She was looking at the rest of us as if we were as much of a threat as the monster she’d just toppled. A threat she meant to destroy.

  “Light them up! Light them up!” she hollered, and threw a surge of crackling energy toward us.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Finn

  The notion that your life flashed before your eyes right before you died was a total crock. As the conjured wave of electricity blazed through the passage, I understood with complete certainty that it would slaughter us, and in that frozen moment of panic, my vision narrowed down to the most arbitrary detail: Lacey’s feet as she darted past the jumbled monster she’d just felled, her bad ankle wobbling. She’d been walking on it all this time, even though it was still sprained. She could have asked Desmond or Rocío—or any of us, honestly—to help with the pain, but she hadn’t.