Ruthless Magic

  The shadows that had grown out of the hedges stretched on and on until I started to think I might end up crossing all of Manhattan before I found my way out. The slow but unsteady rhythm of my pulse kept time with my steps.

  It hadn’t been hard to figure out that the people the examiners had shown me here were conjured. The friends and families of kids who went into the Exam never just disappeared. My parents were probably working right now, worrying about me but completely safe. Abuelito and Abuelita might be taking their midday stroll through Prospect Park. And there was no way the Confed was going to sacrifice a prominent old-magic examinee like Finn just to test a gutter-girl.

  It had still been painful watching those illusions torture themselves and hearing their pleas. I had a feeling I’d be seeing those images all over again the next time I tried to sleep. Maybe for the rest of my life.

  I paused to look around, rubbing my arms. Was that part of the test done, and now I just had to find my way out?

  Then a tall trim figure ambled out of the darkness toward me. My heart stopped.

  Javi halted a couple feet away, his hands slung in his pockets in a familiar pose. His dark hair hung in the same shaggy hairstyle he’d always liked. But he looked different too. A shadow darkened the bronze skin along his jaw, as if he’d missed a morning shave and was now growing enough of a beard for that to matter. His lips were chapped and his cheeks slightly sunken in a way that reminded me of Sean.

  And his eyes. Those deep brown eyes, holding mine, contained more helplessness and loss than I’d ever seen in the brother I’d known—from before the Exam.

  He looked older. A chill raced down my back. He looked as if he’d really aged three years, as if he were a young man of nineteen standing before me.

  I hadn’t believed the examiners would have taken my parents or grandparents or that they’d hurt Finn, but I could accept, without hesitation, that they might have kept Javi from us all this time, held him for some purpose or another.

  He didn’t appear to be carrying any weapon. That was different from the others too.

  “Ro,” he said in a croak of a voice. In Javi’s voice, echoing through my memories. “Ro, I want to come home.”

  A lump rose in my throat, but I managed to speak. “I want you to come home too. Are you— Is this really you, Javi?”

  He frowned. “Don’t you know me? Is three years all it takes to forget?”

  “I never forgot anything,” I said, tearing up.

  “They said if you’d come with me, I could finally go home. We can go. Right now. They promised me.”

  Oh. Of course. The examiners had made this step in the test about a completely different kind of hurting. “I’d have to leave the Exam?”

  “What does the Exam matter if we have each other again?” he asked.

  The magic mattered. He’d only come here so I could keep my talent. He might have sacrificed even more for that than I had.

  “And if I don’t leave now?”

  His expression turned so puzzled it wrenched at me. “Then I’m stuck here,” he said, “for whatever other uses those cabrones decide to put me to. Rocío, please. You have no idea. The last three years...” He dragged in a breath, the way he always had when he’d been trying to avoid saying something he knew would upset me. “Don’t make me go back to that. Let’s leave. Please.”

  A small portion of awe tickled through me even as I shuddered. The skill it must have taken to conjure such a perfect replica... The examiners were so horribly, magnificently cruel.

  Or he might be real. Could the Confed have broken Javi, reduced him to a boy who wanted nothing but to go home? Part of me even wanted to believe that, if that was the only way he could still be alive.

  I closed my eyes, and a different memory swam up. Finn’s crooked smile, the teasing lilt of his voice, the squeeze of his hand around mine. And Prisha and Desmond and Judith, standing around us, agreeing that we’d all go on together.

  I’d promised I’d be there for them. I’d committed to seeing all five of us through this maze and through the rest of the Exam unharmed.

  The Javi I grew up with, the Javi I’d made other promises to, had wanted me to get into the Confed’s college no matter what. He’d risked his life for that. A ripping sensation ran through my gut as I made my decision, but I couldn’t betray that Javi or the four other lives that might depend on me.

  I forced myself to meet his gaze again. “I have to keep going. I’m sorry, but I need to. But I will make Champion, for you. And then, if you’re here, I’ll get you out. Te doy mi palabra.” I ducked my head and hurried past him. “I’m sorry.”

  “Rocío!” Javi called after me. “If we don’t go now, they’ll never let you see me again! They’ll say this was all a trick. Please, don’t leave me. This is all your fault!”

  I almost stopped, almost turned back. Then I gritted my teeth.

  Yes, it was my fault. And it would be my fault too if I gave up and if everything Javi had been through before was for nothing.

  My eyes were so watery I didn’t notice the shadows had faded until someone called my name. Finn ran to me, reaching for my hand. My last thread of self-control snapped. I clutched his shirt and pressed my forehead to his chest, holding on as tight as I could as I choked on the air.

  “Hey,” he said gently. “Hey.” His arms circled me with warmth. Even after three days, his shirt held a lingering sweetness—some fancy fabric softener, I guessed. Breathing it in, feeling his solid body against mine, pulled me away from the memory of Javi. But not completely.

  “It’s over now,” Finn said. “It’s finished.”

  “They took my brother,” I said.

  “It wasn’t real. None of it was real.” A quaver ran through his voice, and I wondered what he’d been through.

  He didn’t know what I meant. How could he? I hadn’t told any of them. I’d hidden that truth all this time, and I didn’t even know why.

  “No.” I swiped at my tears. “They really did. He died here three years ago.” Saying it made my eyes heat up again.

  Finn’s arms tightened around me. He bent his head close to mine, his breath tickling over my hair. “Then they can’t do him any more harm,” he said quietly. “Whatever they showed you, it means nothing. They can’t touch who he truly was. They can’t touch anything that’s in our heads and our hearts, not if we don’t let them.”

  Those last words rang with anger. I eased back far enough to look at him properly. He stared at me with a strange intensity, and then he jerked his gaze away, a blush staining his pale cheeks.

  Oh. I shouldn’t have been surprised—I’d seen him, hadn’t I?—but a flutter passed through me all the same. “They showed you me?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  The examiners had thought I was important enough to Finn that out of everyone he’d ever known, they’d used me to get at him. And they’d been right to, from the way he’d been looking at me a moment ago.

  “But I knew it wasn’t you,” he added, meeting my eyes again with a smile more like the cheerful boy I was used to. “It’d take more mages than they have on staff to make a facsimile that lives up to the real thing.”

  My lips twitched upward even though my throat was still tight. I wanted to tell him that I’d seen him too, but just then someone else came swaying out of the shadows at the other end of the path.

  Prisha was wiping her eyes with short, brisk motions, more like she was trying to get dust out than to dry tears, but it was obvious from the wobble of her jaw that she’d been crying. She combed her fingers back through the dark waves of her hair as she came to a stop. That was the first time I noticed Desmond was there too, hanging back from my little moment with Finn.

  Finn’s smile had fallen. He hurried over to her. “Pree, are you all right?”

  She nodded. “I’ll live.”

  He must have recognized something in her bearing, because he set his hand on her shoulder, leaned in, and said, “You know if your br
others and sister were here, they’d be taking bets on which one caused you the longest hesitation.”

  A startled laugh burst out of Prisha, and Finn grinned, if a little grimly. As I watched him, any part of me that might have been uneasy about how I’d clung to him disintegrated.

  He liked being there for people. He was good at it—because he actually cared.

  He cared about me. For the first time, I let that knowledge sink in without any buts about his family, his background, his prospects in contrast with mine. The truth of it wrapped around me the way his arms had just a moment ago.

  Desmond stirred. “Not that I’m suggesting we take off right now,” he said, “but how long do you think we should give Judith?”

  He spoke from an understanding I suspected we all shared: Judith was the one least likely to make it out. She’d been on the verge of giving up before, and this time none of us had been with her to talk her through it. The muscles in my legs tensed with the urge to walk back into those shadows to search for her. I would have if I’d thought there were any chance the examiners would let me find her.

  “What order did the rest of you go in?” I asked.

  “Finn, then Desmond, and then Judith,” Prisha said. “I went last.”

  “Then she hasn’t been in there that long,” I said. “We—”

  Footsteps padded over the spongy ground, and the girl in question marched out of the thicket of shadows, her face tight and drained of color.

  She was clutching her pearl-handled knife at her side. The thin blade was streaked red. Her other hand, bound to her by the sling, dripped blood onto her shirt. She looked at each of us defiantly, a wet gleam in her eyes.

  “I’m here. I made it.” Her gaze shifted to Desmond, and her mouth twisted. “I made more work for you. Sorry.”

  Desmond had already started forward. As he touched her broken arm gingerly, the rest of us gathered around her.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  She hesitated. None of us had mentioned what we’d seen in the shadows, only who. It had seemed better to leave those awful images unspoken.

  Judith must have felt the same way. “I almost told them to take me out,” she said. “I almost did, but I was trying— I bumped my arm.” She nodded to the sling. “And it hurt. And then... the people wavered a little. I could tell they were only conjured. Just for a second. So I used that. The pain helped. My arm was still partly numbed, though, so I needed more.”

  Her fingers clenched around the palm Desmond had just sealed. She wiped the knife on her jeans and folded it back into the base. Her knuckles were white.

  “I guess I cheated,” she added. “I wasn’t really strong enough.”

  “You made it out,” I said. “That’s all that matters.”

  “They’re not just testing us for magic,” Finn put in. “You said that. You showed them... that you could pay attention to what worked. You figured out how to use the tools you had. That’s valuable too.”

  “Well, now that we’re all out, let’s get going,” Prisha said. “I’m ready to be done with this place.”

  Desmond made a face. “I think we’ve got a long way to go still.”

  As we headed onward, the hedges around us revealed nothing except the vague impression of a sky above. The crawling noises had stopped, and the ground stayed still. I’d have appreciated that change if the silence hadn’t felt even more ominous now.

  “Do you think Lacey made it through those shadows?” Judith said.

  “I’ve gotten the impression there are a lot of people in her life she’d be happy to see get hurt as payback,” Prisha said dryly.

  “Those aren’t the people the examiners would have shown her,” I said. What kind of torture had they conjured up for her?

  Judith shivered. “It’s sick,” she said. She left it at that so long I thought she was done. Then she blurted out, “There are countries where they don’t go in for Dampering, you know. A few of them. Places where everyone just keeps the abilities they have. No big tests so you have to fight to stay a mage.”

  “I’ve heard that’s only in places where they hardly have any magical culture to begin with,” Prisha said.

  “Maybe,” Judith said. “But I heard people talking a couple times at the embassy functions with my dad. They’d say that Dampering isn’t really about protecting us or maintaining the peace. That it’s just about the leaderships keeping control, pushing us around. I thought they just didn’t understand. But there’s no reason to put people through something like… like that back there. There’s no reason to make everything so horrible just to see...”

  Her voice had gone ragged. She swiped her hand across her mouth. “Maybe they were right,” she said. “The people who criticized the Confed and the other coalitions like it. Everything the examiners are doing to us, it gets worse and worse. Is this really just a test? Or are they trying to get ‘payback’ from us because we didn’t go along with being Dampered the way they wanted?”

  A prickle ran over my skin. The examiners might be listening to her saying these things right now. “The job they want the Champions to do could be as bad as this,” I said, hating that I was defending the Confed when I agreed with everything she said. “It does make sense that they’d want to watch us and see how far they can push us, right?”

  Say “That’s true.” Take back what you said, Judith. Just for now, just out loud. Remember where we are.

  But Judith was shaking her head. “That’s part of the problem,” she said. “Even if we ‘win,’ we don’t get any more choice than if we’d let ourselves be Dampered. We get less! At least if we were Dampered, we’d be able to pick something to do with the magic we had left. We’d have options. Options that don’t involve killing people or risk being killed. Even if they need people to fight, even if there are huge threats we have to worry about... I hate them.”

  Before any of us could figure out how to answer that, we turned a corner and found ourselves facing a wide space in the middle of the maze. It was divided into five lanes, each separated by hedges only a couple of feet high. Beyond the lanes, the taller hedges converged into another narrow path.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Desmond said.

  “You don’t imagine they’re generously offering us a little breathing room?” Finn said, his eyes fixed on the lanes.

  “Well, we have to go through it either way,” Prisha said.

  We filed in tentatively. I’d only taken one step into the wider space when a ’chantment caught me. The unseen force tugged me to the right. I tried to pull against it, but my legs jarred.

  My feet locked in place in front of one of the lanes. When I tried to lift my sneakers, they resisted. Judith had come to a halt at my right, Prisha at my left.

  “What—” My voice died as five figures slipped into the room from the narrow passage across from us.

  I stiffened automatically, but the two men and three women who spread out opposite us didn’t look the slightest bit threatening. They were all adults, not fellow examinees: one quite young, one who looked as old as my abuela, the others somewhere in between. The only thing odd about them was that they all looked panicked, and all wore pale blue tunics that ended around their knees.

  Hospital gowns. They had on hospital gowns.

  The woman directly across from me stood with an artificially straight posture. Her chubby arms hugged her torso, and her eyes were stark with terror within their frame of chestnut curls. She was trembling.

  A light flared into being on her chest and those of the other four at the same time: an angry scarlet light that seemed to churn as it pulsed. Like the pulsing lights on the sentries in what we hadn’t known was Iran. A vise squeezed around my heart.

  No.

  The presence in the magic condensed around me with an iron grip, digging into my scalp and shoulders. I winced. This time I wasn’t surprised to feel it. The magic always contracted like this when something or someone was going to die, as if it wanted to r
esist as much as I did.

  A low female voice began speaking, seemingly from right in front of us. “Each of the people you see before you carries a detonation ’chantment,” it said with clinical calmness. “If they reach your end of the room, it will explode with enough force to kill you, them, and all your companions. But it is tied to the host’s life. Strike them where the light pulses, and they will die. Then the ’chantment will dissolve.”

  As the last word faded in the air, the figures in the hospital gowns moved. They slid slowly but steadily toward us as if on invisible conveyer belts, their feet coasting across the smooth ground. The red lights on their chests blazed brighter.

  “No!” I said, out loud this time. The woman in my lane flailed as if trying to reel backward, but her legs were locked in place like mine. She gasped.

  Where had she come from? How had the Confed just... taken her for this horrific purpose?

  Or maybe she and the others weren’t real at all. They could be more illusions.

  She didn’t feel like an illusion, though. There was a quality to her, like the sentries in yesterday’s test, that I only now realized had been missing from the conjured figures in the shadows. A subtle irregularity to her movements that no automation could quite duplicate. And why wouldn’t the examiners want to see if we could kill real people when the targets actually looked human?

  I couldn’t do it. They’d made me a murderer unknowingly, but I couldn’t strike down another human being. A human being who was looking me in the face, unarmed and petrified. ¡Ni madres!

  She swayed closer. The scarlet light of the detonation ’chantment pulsed harsher. But murdering her couldn’t be the only answer.

  My tongue tripped. “Cuando tienen frío,” I sang out, to cool and to calm. I propelled the energy through the shivering clench of magic around me and into the woman.

  The light didn’t dim. Her forward motion didn’t slow. Not good enough.

  I snapped out a line that should have frozen her in place, but the magic pressing her forward tore through my intent, leaving my chest aching from the effort. She inched another foot closer, and another. Halfway to me. Tears trickled from her eyes.