Callum snorted. “I just don’t put in more effort than I need to. Maybe you should consider the same approach. And I’ve got more of those ’chanted cracklers too.”
I didn’t know what a “crackler” was, but knowing Callum, it couldn’t be anything pleasant.
“All right,” the girl said, shifting from foot to foot. “Let’s get on with it, then. What’s the plan?”
“Move fast,” Callum said. “Just keep enough distance that they don’t see you coming. I’ll go over there and distract them while you’re getting into place—pretend I’m too hurt to fight, beg for mercy.” He laughed harshly. “I know a couple of those dopes. They’ll buy it for long enough. I’ll hit them first, hard, and the rest of you jump in then. Agreed?”
The others nodded. The group fanned out. Callum sauntered straight ahead, toward me.
I jerked back behind the hovel. Resolve settled like a stone in my gut.
He was alone now—and he wasn’t aware I was here. He was the trigger in their plan. If I incapacitated him and then ran to warn the others, we could escape before his allies agreed to launch their attack. I could eliminate our most dangerous enemy: the figure who’d sparked the violence here, who’d united the four of them and aimed them at us.
I’d have to disable him quickly enough to avoid retaliation and hard enough to prevent him recovering before the Exam ended. Even without a headache pulsing between my temples, I wouldn’t have counted on myself to accomplish that much with a casting in one try.
The answer wasn’t magic, then. I needed another trick... or the same one. My hand fell to the solid line of the dissolving rod at my hip.
This was why Margo had given it to me: so that if it came down to my life or someone else’s, I could save mine.
It was more than just my life now. The memory of Callum heaving his sack at Prisha flashed through my mind, and my stomach twisted. The way he’d run at Rocío next—I had bruises on top of my bruises from where he’d hammered me after I’d tackled him. He meant to kill all five of us, using whatever means he could. Attacking him first was merely self-defense.
I drew out the rod, my fingers curling around it. At the press of my thumb, its lid flipped open. The ache in my head expanded a little farther as I cast a quick ’chantment to thicken the shadows beside the hovel. Then I leaned out just enough to set eyes on Callum.
He was only twenty feet away, clutching his side and limping toward the hovel, putting on his act now that he was in view of the dunes. I supposed he meant to use the structure for the same purpose I had, as a defensive position from which to scout out his enemies before he made his final approach. A short metal baton bobbed on his belt.
When he turned his head with a wary glance toward the other end of the arena, he allowed himself a smile—that hard, narrow smile that had always served as a warning to run for cover.
A rush of heat coursed through me. Abruptly, I imagined myself jamming the dissolving rod right into the center of his chest, watching that smile falter with a bloody gurgle as his heart disintegrated and his eyes fogged. My lungs clenched at the image, but a tickle of anticipation followed.
He deserved it. He’d earned it. It would pay him back for everyone he’d hurt, everyone he meant to hurt, now and ever.
That last thought caught me with a chill that washed the anger right out of me. What was I thinking? Since when was I aiming to act as executioner? If I had to, if Callum gave me no choice, I’d do it, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to become someone who wanted to.
Callum scanned the area around him again. Then he pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead and closed his eyes with a wince that looked… genuine.
Was his head bothering him too? Had the other boy guessed right that Callum had drained himself?
How could he not have? Even I had been able to cast with more strength than he had in our classes. That had to be why most of his assaults had been physical, not magical. He was rationing his energy, attempting to work around his weakness.
Like me.
For one peculiar moment, through the ache in my own head, I felt as though I stood in two places: where I crouched and where he walked. I don’t think even they like him, Prisha had said of Callum’s parents, and it was true. They’d known from the start he lacked the talent to be Chosen. Everyone had been able to observe how his family’s favor lay with his sister.
How crushing would it have been to feel Granduncle Raymond’s cutting disdain every day from the people who’d raised me? Would I be the one raging at the “wimps” and grasping for every vicious advantage?
I had no time to ponder the possibilities. Callum was nearly on me. I gripped the rod.
I wouldn’t kill him, but if I was to ensure he didn’t kill us, I had to hurt him badly enough that he’d need to focus whatever energy he had left on keeping himself alive.
My gaze settled on his upper leg. If I hit him in the thigh, he wouldn’t be able to walk again without proper medical treatment, but he should be capable of containing the bleeding, especially if he was carrying one of those first aid kits in his sack. That seemed like the fairest compromise.
I pulled back against the hovel. Callum’s halting footsteps scraped across the ground. I flexed my shoulders, bracing myself. All at once I felt like vomiting, as if I hadn’t already purged enough in the last two days. Maybe I didn’t have the will to commit even this much violence…
I had to—if not for me, then for Rocío, for Prisha, for everyone.
Callum slowed near the hovel. He started to step around it. My pulse lurched, and I threw myself around the corner at him.
He flinched at my charge but not fast enough to avoid me. Ducking beneath the swing of his arm, I jabbed the rod’s point into the side of his thigh.
His exclamation broke off in a hiss of pain, and we both toppled, me stumbling over him. He pummeled me with his fist and the baton he’d wrenched from his belt. It must have been ’chanted, because every strike sent an unnatural sting lancing through my body. One of his knuckles ricocheted off my forehead, but I held on to the dissolving rod.
I heaved myself backward, dodging his sprawled feet. A red gush soaked through his cargo pants down to the knee. There was no need for him to pretend injury now.
Callum bent over his leg, his breath ragged as he choked out a verse over the ruined hollow where a chunk of his thigh muscle had ceased to be. Skin, muscle, and bone had melted in the gash. I gagged at the sight.
As I reeled back toward the hovel, Callum reached into a pocket by his knee. His face was yellowing. He broke from his casting with a hoarse shout.
“Get them!” he said, fixing me with a glare that would have burned me to a crisp if he’d had the power to. “Kill them all!” He whipped the stone he’d grabbed from his pocket at me.
I heaved myself out of the way, and it struck the hollow on the far side of the dune with an earth-shaking boom.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Rocío
“Finn’s not back yet?” Prisha said when we returned to our stakeout spot.
Before the worry in my gut had time to reach my thoughts, a shout rang out. A thunderclap reverberated through the air and the ground, tossing me backward into the others. Leonie caught my arm.
A thin whine from above made my head jerk up. Tiny blades of energy were raining down on us.
I managed to blurt out a shielding lyric. Desmond and Prisha’s voices rose to join mine, but we weren’t quite fast enough. One of the blades sliced across my shoulder; another caught the edge of my ear. Pain burst through my skin. Voices hollered all around us.
Finn stumbled down the trench toward us, his face flushed and his eyes wild. Fresh blood splattered his shirt. My heart stopped.
“Sorry,” he said, panting. “I thought I could prevent this without—”
A rush of flame seared over our shield. The surface shook, enough heat seeping through to singe my scalp. The magic was cringing around me, cowering against my shoulders,
and the barrier protecting us trembled with it.
With the magic weakening, our opponents were going to have trouble drawing power to conjure their attacks too, but that wouldn’t help us if our shield broke first.
With a hiss, a rush of clear liquid cascaded down the floor of the trench toward us. From the way it was steaming, I didn’t think we wanted it touching us. Our “strategic” position wasn’t so strategic anymore.
“Run for it!” I shouted.
No one needed additional convincing. We scrambled up the slope and charged down the other side. Desmond pointed across the arena, and I veered to follow him.
The air warbled with a conjured force, but the blur of energy streaked by us, hardly touching our shield. We raced around the spire where Finn and I had slept and on toward another that stood just a few feet from the hedge. If we had shelter in front and the hedge wall at our backs, our enemies would have fewer directions to assault us from.
Except the spire was barely wide enough to shield three of us effectively, let alone five. We clustered behind it, our breaths ragged. Finn bent to snatch up a mallet he’d dropped—when had he gotten that?—and Leonie held out her hand.
“Would you give me that?” she said. “I should be able to— I can arrange us a better barricade.”
He passed the mallet to her and rubbed his forehead. His headache was back, it seemed, but he didn’t seem physically injured, at least no more than he’d been when I last saw him.
The blood on his shirt wasn’t his.
He saw me looking. “Callum,” he said roughly. “I didn’t— He’s alive. He’s just going to be... distracted until this is over. But the other three are fixated on taking us down.”
“And Lacey’s here somewhere,” I said. “Unless they—”
He shook his head. “They mentioned her. I think we all have to keep an eye out for her.”
Leonie had slipped around the side of the spire. She raised the mallet, its head hardly wider than her fist, and sang out a short, rolling line in Latin as she swung it against the spire.
The ivory rock cracked. The split raced through the stalk as the spire above wobbled. Leonie smacked it with her palm, and it tipped with her shove. Ten feet of rock careened to the ground like a chopped tree.
“Come on,” Leonie said, dropping down behind it.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” Desmond asked as we spread out along the fallen spire.
“I’ve got a knack for stone,” Leonie said. “Not something that came up at the Academy a whole lot, granted. I’ve never worked on anything quite that big before.” She let out a shaky laugh. Then she glanced toward the rest of us. “So there’s just three of them after us? How’re we going to strike back?”
“We’re not going to,” I said. My chest clenched at the thought, the magic clenching around me in turn.
“Why not?” she demanded. “The way you can cast, you could probably deal with all of them on your own!”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “If we start hurling those kinds of castings around too, we’ll just drain the magic even faster. And... I don’t want to make Champion if I have to hurt people—kill people—to do it. Do you?”
She stared at me, and I braced myself. She might decide we were obstacles rather than on her side. She wiped a hand across her mouth, and her hazel eyes shadowed.
“We have to do something other than hiding,” she said. “They were already finding ways to get around our shield. They almost broke it. I don’t want to kill anyone—that goes without saying—but I would like to leave here alive.”
“We don’t have much choice,” Prisha said. “We could take them down. She’s right. We haven’t fought back yet, so they won’t be expecting it. If we hit them hard and fast enough—”
“No,” Finn said. “We’re finding another way.”
Another way. Something other than the avenues the examiners had left for us: killing or being killed.
I inhaled slowly. “We can’t keep running and hiding all day.” That was pretty clear.
“As long as they can maneuver around us, we can’t keep them off us,” Finn said. “Could we box them up somehow?”
“No,” I said. “They’d break a cage just like they’re breaking our shields. No matter what we cast, they could cast something to counteract it.”
“Judith’s boxes stopped us from casting,” Desmond pointed out.
Hope sparked inside me but only for a second. “We couldn’t build something that complex quickly enough. They’d feel it coming.” And shatter it before it took effect. Judith had needed four hours to cast her ’chantment. I might be able to do it faster but not fast enough.
But that idea felt like a step in the right direction. I hadn’t wanted to use magic for anything other than helping or healing, but as long as I wasn’t hurting anyone, I could still pass this test on my terms.
“What if,” I said, testing the idea as I put it into words, “instead of trying to build something to stop them from conducting the magic, we just stopped the parts of them that they use to conduct it, directly?”
“Without killing them?” Prisha said.
“It’d be tricky to pull off,” I said. “But if we manage it, we’ll all get through this alive.”
“I’m listening,” Desmond said, propping his elbow against the side of the spire. “But we should figure it out fast. They’re coming.”
I peeked over the top of the fallen spire. The three figures had gathered together again. They were stalking from one far-off spire to a closer shack. The obscuring ’chantment they’d cast on themselves turned their bodies into blurs that, at a glance, could almost have been shadows.
They weren’t going to make carrying out my plan easy for us, and in a couple minutes they’d be close enough to start up their assault again.
The dark blurring of their forms stirred up my memory of the sentries in Iran—the guards we’d ripped through unknowingly. My throat tightened.
I was not going to let that happen here. Not again. That was not who I was, no matter what the Confed thought of new-magic families and our street-grown talents.
I dropped back down. If I’d had the training, I’d have hit them with the magimedical equivalent of a general anesthesia, but the brain was far too delicate an organ for me to want to risk experimenting. I wouldn’t know where to start. But we did have other, less sophisticated options.
“Okay,” I said. “If we can stop them from moving—their arms and legs, their mouths, their vocal chords too, I guess, and anything else they could use to make sound, to cast—then they’re stuck. They can’t do anything to us. And we just wait down the clock.”
Prisha frowned. “We’ll have to focus carefully if we don’t want to accidentally stop them from breathing, which I assume is not what you’re going for.”
“It’s better than planning to stop them from breathing in the first place, isn’t it?” I said.
And hopefully it wouldn’t hurt the magic either. It would just be a... rearranging of states rather than blatant destruction.
“I have to be honest,” Finn said. “I don’t think I’m capable of handling even one of them on my own, but I’ll give everything I have to support the rest of you.”
“You and I could take on one of them together,” Desmond suggested. He pushed himself up onto his knees.
“Then the two of you could focus on another,” I said to Prisha and Leonie. “And I’ll take the last one.”
I could handle that to start with, at least. For how long, I didn’t know. How many more hours were left before the examiners would call this test to an end?
“So what about—” Leonie started, but Desmond made a silencing jerk of his hand.
We all straightened up to look over the side of our barricade.
The shadowy figures had reached the next spire over: a short, spindly one with a single platform near the top of its stalk. They’d have to cross open ground to get at us now.
“They’re climbi
ng it,” Finn said. “Going for a higher vantage point.”
Maybe they could reach us from that distance. I watched them as they scrambled up, one after the other, staying on the far side of the spire. “We need to be ready as soon as we have a good view of them,” I said. “I’ll focus on the one closest to the right.”
“We’ll do the left?” Finn said to Desmond.
“Works for me.”
“So middle for us it is,” Prisha said.
I drew a lyric onto my tongue: an old lullaby. Arru arru. The air around the platform shimmered with the start of an opposing conjuring. I choked out the command: “Now!”
I aimed all my attention at the hazy figure to the right of the trio. As I sang out the lyric, I propelled my awareness toward his hulking body, hearkening the shapes of elbows and hips and feet, the movement of lips, the vibration of a membrane in a throat. The magic stretched and quivered but held my intent. I clamped it around the boy.
The ’chantment he’d woven around himself dissolved to reveal a startled face, arms partly raised, mouth half-open. The strain of his muscles pushing against my ’chantment echoed through the magic into me, but I could ignore that. In the first few seconds, the casting felt almost easy.
Then a blaze of light slashed across my vision, rocking the fallen spire I was leaning against. Desmond swore, and my concentration snapped. As I lost my grip on the boy across from me, I felt him whipping into action.
No.
The impact had knocked Leonie onto her back, her shoulder twisted at an unnatural angle. She groaned as she tried to sit up.
“Desmond!” I said.
He was already spinning to help her. I threw my focus back at our attackers’ platform. I could see all three of them clearly now; we’d dispelled their disguises.
The wiry boy hurled another of his bladelike assaults at us. Prisha shouted out a poetic line that solidified a new shield in front of us. The streaks of energy bounced off it into the ground, leaving a line of gouges in the gritty surface.
“Arru arru,” I cooed again, trying to toss my intent around all three of our opponents. I caught two, the hulking boy and the girl beside him, who I thought had cast the blaze. Limbs. Mouths. Throats. Still, still.