Ruthless Magic

  I was vaguely aware of Judith beside me, her breath stuttering as she tried to hum, voice breaking when she tried to cast, and of Prisha muttering to herself. But they felt far, far away from the woman who slid closer to me with every thud of my pulse—far from the red light glaring at me from her chest. I wanted to glance toward Finn, to see how he was coping, but I didn’t dare shift my focus from my intended victim.

  “Please don’t,” the woman whimpered. “Please. Help me.”

  I rolled out another line and another—to unwind, to disperse, anything I could think of that might defuse the bomb within her or release her from the pull toward me. Nothing sank in. Every effort wisped away as if I were a toddler attempting my first castings. I scrambled for something else to try, fighting the rising mass of panic inside me. Fifteen seconds, maybe twenty, before she’d reach me.

  I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t kill her. Please, God, if I never conjured up a vision of beauty for Dulls again, lend me the art to save this one woman.

  “Help me!” the woman wailed. She leaned away from me, but only a couple feet remained between us now. There was a thump somewhere down the line. A choked gasp. My stomach tightened into a ball as I threw out one more verse.

  The ’chantment on the woman didn’t so much as waver. The squeeze of the magic around me jittered.

  I pushed my awareness through those tremors toward the scorching hot threads of the ’chantment. There. I could hearken it, the rhythm of it. I sucked in a breath. Maybe I could unravel it if I just—

  Prisha’s voice rang in my left ear, shouting a line in Greek.

  A gleaming bolt hit the woman where the detonation ’chantment glowed. Instantly, she seized up. Her limbs went rigid and her eyes rolled. The red light blinked out. I knew she was dead before she hit the ground at my feet.

  I whirled around, my vision blurring. Prisha stood beside me like before, her mouth terse but her eyes wide. Another body sprawled between the low hedges in front of her, just a few paces away. Maybe she’d also tried to find another solution before following the examiner’s instructions, but—

  “Why did you do that?” I said. “I was going to— I could have—”

  “You were going to get us all killed,” Prisha broke in. “Didn’t you listen to the instructions? Another few seconds and that woman would have blown all of us up. If you want to commit suicide, do it some way that doesn’t take the rest of us down with you.”

  “You killed her,” I said.

  “She was already dead from the moment the examiners put that ’chantment on her. They killed her. I just made sure she didn’t kill anyone else in the process.” Her voice was harsh, but she couldn’t quite control the tremor in it. How much was she justifying the action to me and how much to herself?

  A sob burst out behind me. Judith was crouched on the ground, her face pressed to her knees. The man she’d killed slumped just beyond her. Her pearl-handled knife lay beside him, not even unfolded. She’d jabbed him in the chest with that, I thought distantly. She hadn’t been able to pull a casting together, so she’d struck the pulsing light whatever way she could. A tap with the handle had been enough.

  Past Prisha, two other bodies in hospital gowns sprawled limply. Desmond had sat down at the end of his lane, his head bowed. Finn had turned toward the hedge behind us with his hands clenched tight and his face ashen. His throat worked. Then he pushed himself away, spinning toward us.

  “Pree,” he began, so rough and wretched it broke my heart.

  “I had a little more time,” I said. This was my fight, not his. “I might have found a way to defuse it. I almost did.”

  “And if you hadn’t?” Prisha said. “You were cutting it too close. You didn’t have the guts to do it. You would have let us all die.”

  “I don’t want anyone to die!” I protested.

  But that wasn’t all there was to it, was there? I hadn’t wanted to be a killer. So now someone else was two times over.

  “Then you shouldn’t have come into the Exam,” Prisha snapped.

  Finn grasped her shoulder. “Pree, I’m sure Rocío would have done what she had to in the end, if it came to that. But it’s done now anyway.”

  “Because I did it!” Prisha said. She looked from my strained face to Finn’s sickly one and let out a strangled sound. “I need a minute. I need... I just need a minute.” She whirled and stalked off down the path we’d emerged from.

  “I—I’m sorry,” I said to Finn, not totally sure what I was apologizing for. For not coming up with a better answer in time? For not killing that poor woman?

  Maybe I wouldn’t have acted in time if my last try had failed. Maybe I’d have resisted the role the examiners were forcing me into so stubbornly that I’d have lost the last second and become a murderer in a totally different way. I swallowed hard. There were no easy answers here.

  “I know,” Finn said softly. His hand grasped at vacant air. He stared after Prisha. “She shouldn’t be off on her own. I’ll—I’ll get her.”

  He propelled himself away from the rest of us and hurried down the passage after her.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Finn

  There were some matters in life no person should ever have to question, such as: Would you have received utterly different grades if the teachers hadn’t known who your family was? Had your best friend only pretended to respect you to spare your feelings?

  Did you have the capacity to kill an innocent human being?

  Even as I hurried after Prisha, my mind remained stuck. Nothing shifted in my head except a single gear spinning and spinning without catching on anything. I barely felt my body other than the cramping of my gut with each thud of my feet.

  He’d looked so distraught, the man. The man I’d had to— So bewildered. From the moment that cool voice had recited our instructions, I’d known no casting I could produce would undo the ones the examiners had set. I’d scarcely had the strength to pick apart my own on the radio.

  I’d still tried. I’d tried with shaking voice and shakier hands while the man’s skin turned waxier and his eyes bulged with fear, until I’d given in.

  I’d let myself look at nothing but that burning red light as I tossed the slightest conjuring at it, and just like that, he’d fallen—fallen and lain there, sprawled, not absorbing into the floor as the creature before had.

  He’d been real. He’d been alive.

  And then not.

  My stomach flipped again, but there was nothing left for me to vomit. I’d already emptied what little remained in it as I’d retched and spat at the base of the hedge right after.

  Think about Prisha. Think only of finding her and bringing her back to the group, so we can go on, so we can escape this place—so we can be finished, Fates willing.

  I heard her before I saw her. Her voice, so low and thready I couldn’t make out the words, traveled from around the first bend in the passage. I assumed she was murmuring to herself. It was only as I came around the corner that the sounds composed themselves into sentences.

  “…isn’t anything else I can tell you. Answer me! I—”

  My legs stalled. Prisha cut herself off, and her hand jerked away from her mouth. We stared at each other. The gear in my head spun and spun and—

  “Who were you talking to?”

  Prisha straightened up. Her cheeks were dry but the rims of her eyes red. “No one. I was just thinking out loud.” She kept her gaze a hair averted.

  My hands balled. “You were asking someone to answer you—”

  A tremor tossed the ground beneath us. I stumbled to the side and threw myself down to avoid crashing into the serrated hedge wall. Prisha dropped to her knees next to me. The ground pitched and rumbled, and a crackling sound tore through the air ahead of us. Where Rocío and the others were waiting.

  Before the ground had fully stilled, I scrambled up. I delayed only long enough to help Prisha to her feet, and then I ran for the killing lanes.

  I halted
partway down the path. The wider space and the lanes were gone. Nothing remained in front of us but a straight, narrow path stretching off into the near distance. The hedges had shifted, cutting us off from the rest of the group.

  “Rocío?” I shouted. “Desmond? Judith?”

  My voice bounced thinly off the glossy thorns. No one replied. Either they couldn’t hear us, or they could but were incapable of answering.

  “If they’re still around, we’re not going to get back to them standing here,” Prisha said. “Come on. We should keep moving.”

  “We can’t just— We don’t even know what happened to them!” I said.

  “And we can’t chop through that hedge to find out,” Prisha said. “Look, everything—everything—the examiners have done to us…” Her voice quavered, and she paused to swallow audibly. “They wouldn’t just wipe out three of us in a snap. That wouldn’t test anything. So the others have got to be here somewhere. We’ll just— Judith and Rocío were on the right side of the room, weren’t they? So we’ll take every right turn. And Judith will insist on taking the lefts. If the paths connect again, we’ll find them.”

  I despised all the uncertainties in that plan. We didn’t know that Rocío and Judith had stayed where they’d been in the minute or two after I’d departed. We didn’t know where Desmond might have been. We didn’t know any of them could even walk right now.

  Nonetheless, it was something—something my mind could latch on to apart from the memories I’d already relived too many times.

  If Rocío could go forward, she would.

  “Finn?” Prisha’s expression was wary.

  My thoughts shot back to the moment when I’d discovered her, the questions she hadn’t yet answered.

  “We’ll talk,” she said. “But not now, okay? Let’s just— One thing at a time. We find the others first. All right?”

  It wasn’t all right. Nothing that had transpired in the last half hour was remotely all right. The burn of stomach acid lingered on my tongue—the tongue that had cast the conjuring to…

  I pressed my hand to my face. Breathe in. Breathe out. Take it one step at a time. Get through this.

  We had to get back to the others. I’d already wasted too much time standing there.

  “All right,” I said.

  We started forward, Prisha keeping close to my side. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “You had to do it. We all had to do it. It’s what the examiners wanted.”

  “I had a choice… I made a choice.”

  “They’re the ones who gave us those choices. Your only other option was letting all of us die.”

  I’d almost forgotten she’d made the same choice twice over. I glanced sideways at her. Her jaw was clenched.

  It felt imperative to say this much: “I don’t blame you for what you did. With Rocío. I don’t think she’d have let us be hurt, but I understand why you stepped in. I—I’m sorry you felt you had to.”

  “You shouldn’t be apologizing for that,” she muttered, but her shoulders eased down a fraction.

  The path turned, forcing us to the left. We walked on. Several minutes later, it split in two, and we took the right branch as we’d agreed.

  A voice carried to my ears—faint, but it sounded like Rocío’s. My spirits leapt. I made to dash forward, and Prisha grabbed my arm.

  “Wait!” she said. “There’s... I think there’s a ’chantment on the path.”

  I studied the stretch of gray ground and dark green hedges before us, which looked no different from the paths we’d encountered before. The magic whispered around me in the same faint harmony. I’d never been able to hearken subtler castings, but then, neither had Prisha.

  “What?” I said. “Why?”

  “It’s just a feeling,” Prisha said. “Let’s go back and take the other branch.”

  “Our plan was to stay to the right. We could lose the others completely.”

  “Will you just trust me on this?”

  If it had been the first day of the Exam, I would have immediately said yes. It wasn’t, though, and Prisha had been behaving rather strangely for longer than I’d wanted to admit. I’d put her pushiness and odd moods down to stress, but suddenly I wasn’t so sure.

  Prisha grimaced at my hesitation. “Look,” she said. “I’ll test it out, and we’ll see.”

  She murmured to her hand and conjured a wooden ball. It looked too small to be sure of triggering any possible trap, but she lobbed it down the path as if she knew precisely where it needed to strike.

  The ball bounced twice on the rubbery ground and then hit a patch where it stuck. The gray surface rippled around it, swallowing it down.

  “See?” Prisha said. “Now let’s go.”

  No mark remained on the ground where the ball had disappeared, not even a dimple—nothing at all to indicate where the sinkhole began or ended or that it existed at all.

  A prickle ran down my spine. “Prisha, how did you know?”

  “The floor just felt off. Can we go now? I thought you were in a hurry to find the others.”

  I was, but I couldn’t let this subject drop.

  Prisha hadn’t merely prodded us onward at each new challenge with increasing insistence, had she? She’d never appeared all that fazed by the tests. She’d taken each of them in stride... as if she’d had some prior knowledge. She’d defended the examiners when the rest of us had complained.

  The words spilled out of me before the revelation had even quite dawned. “You’ve been talking to them. The examiners have been telling you things, letting you know what to watch for? How—”

  “You don’t want to know,” she broke in. “I promise you, Finn, you don’t. Can you please just drop it?”

  My thoughts were already whirling too fast. She’d slipped apart from the rest of us last night before I’d found her in the hall. Had she gone to consult with the examiners? She’d ducked away right before the Iran test too. To grab a bottle of water, she’d said, but she’d taken at least a couple minutes coming back.

  That had been immediately after she’d questioned Mark about his distrust of the Confed, and less than an hour later, a squadron of sentries had come charging straight at him, as if someone had pointed him out as a target.

  Every inch of my skin went cold. What had I heard her say when I’d caught her back there in the maze? There isn’t anything else I can tell you.

  “Did you make some sort of deal with them?” I burst out. “You tell them things about us, and they help you make it through the Exam? I can’t just ignore this, Pree. What in Hades’s name is going on?”

  “It’s not like that,” Prisha said.

  She’d fixated on Rocío too. The chill ran down to my bones. Prisha had brought up the conjured dragon out of nowhere, even though she’d barely cared about it when we saw it. She’d badgered Rocío about whether she’d be quick enough to fight—not just today but before as well.

  She folded her arms tight across her chest. “Gods, Finn, as if you could understand.”

  “Of course I can’t understand! You’ve been hiding it from me, lying to me—”

  “What was I supposed to say?” she snapped, her voice so pained and yet furious that my throat closed up. “‘By the way, Finn, a representative from the Exam committee came by to inform me that I’ve got a spot at the college if I report for them during the Exam, and if I say no, I’ll be Dampered. So obviously I’m going to let them buy me’? Should I have mentioned that before or after you got completely caught up in your crusade to prove you wouldn’t accept any injustice?”

  “Pree…” My hands fumbled at my sides. I didn’t know what to do with them. I scarcely knew what to do with my mouth.

  “What would you have said to me? How would you have looked at me? As if it’s so easy to take a stand when you don’t already have the higher ground. No one in the Confed would ever have forced you to choose between playing snitch and losing everything.”

  “So... from the beginning... before we even
went in, you were working for them?”

  “They told me it was the only way. That they’d guarantee I’d make Champion as long as I did what they asked.” She laughed roughly. “Of course, I’m not even sure of that now, but what was I supposed to do? Say no and spend the rest of my life as an errand girl ten steps behind the rest of my family? It was the only real choice I had.”

  “What exactly did the Exam committee tell you?”

  “Only that they’d ensure I got through. And they gave me some methods of identifying the traps, at least the smaller ones, like that.” She nodded to the sinkhole. “I wasn’t supposed to say anything to anyone else. I shouldn’t even have stopped you.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “And in exchange, you were ‘reporting’ on us.”

  “There must be circumstances where they can’t fully monitor us,” she said. “All they asked was that I let them know if I heard anyone speaking against the Confed or if another situation arose that I thought they’d want to be informed of. They mentioned a couple of people they wanted me to keep a particular eye on, topics I should bring up with them. That’s it.”

  I tried to imagine being approached with the same ultimatum. How would I have responded if I’d felt my only chance at a life in which I could be happy meant betraying a bunch of other mages who hadn’t deserved their misfortune any more than I had?

  Prisha was right: I couldn’t place myself entirely in that perspective. I could accept how she’d made the choice at the start, when the betrayals had been theoretical, the people strangers.

  They hadn’t remained theoretical, though.

  “A couple of people,” I repeated. “Mark and Rocío. That’s why you made a point of hanging around her at the beginning.”

  Prisha lowered her head enough for the motion to serve as an answer.

  “Mark almost died, Pree! Maybe he did die. You told them that nonsense he was saying about his brother, didn’t you? And then they sent those guards right at him. They must have prompted that attack.”

  It hadn’t been nonsense either, had it? The brainwashing part, maybe, but if Mark’s half brother had made Champion, then he could be overseas running missions right now. Of course he’d have withdrawn from his family.