Wounded Magic

by Megan Crewe

  “Of course.”

  The five of us stepped outside the café into a crisp but gray November day. Mark and Floyd headed off on foot—we’d met in Queens because it was the most convenient neighborhood for them and Tamara. Noemi waved down a cab. Tamara touched my arm to hold me back for a moment.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked. What would she have wanted to say without the others here? Had I put my foot in it somehow? It wouldn’t be the first time.

  She gave me a wry smile. “I think so. Mostly I wanted to thank you for stepping up the way you did last week. I know it can’t have been easy to put yourself out there. You’ve had some useful things to contribute—and you know how to talk to people, which is half the battle right there. I’m glad to have you on our side because of that, and because, even young as you are, the old-magic crowd is going to listen to someone who’s one of them before anyone else.”

  My face heated up. “I didn’t want to— I mean, I don’t think I—”

  “Hey,” she said, holding up her hand. “It’s okay. I don’t mean it as criticism; it’s just a fact. I can tell you mean well. Which is why I also wanted to remind you, just for the future, because who knows where it’ll take us: make sure you keep listening to the people you’re speaking up for. You’ve got to listen, and to listen well, if your intention is to boost everyone’s voices and not just your own.”

  “That makes sense,” I said, my cheeks still burning—but I welcomed that discomfort if it meant her words stuck with me. “I definitely didn’t get involved with the League just to benefit me.”

  “I didn’t think you did, Finn,” she said, waving me off as she started ambling away. “You’re a good kid. Stay that way, all right?”

  I stood there in front of the café for a moment longer, the brisk breeze cooling my face. My parents expected me to be out at least a couple more hours. Perhaps the walk to the nearest subway station would do me good.

  The exhilaration of the meeting, feeling the pieces of this protest come together, had faded in the wake of an anxiety that had nothing to do with Tamara’s cautioning. Well, other than the fact that it tied directly into my being an old-magic kid.

  I had to join the others at the college for the sit-in. I couldn’t put myself forward as one of the organizers of the rally and then abandon the effort at the most crucial moment. What were the chances that one of my former Academy classmates wouldn’t spot me and make some sort of comment, though? Nearly nil, I suspected.

  It wouldn’t be awful to simply be recognized in front of the others, since anyone could have guessed I’d gone to the Academy after what I’d shared, but I couldn’t count on keeping that one last awful detail—my family name—secret. The League members had accepted me as an old-magic failure. I wasn’t certain they’d ever accept a Lockwood, not while there was another Lockwood among the ten in the Circle.

  Even if they did accept me, Ary and her supporters would probably jump at the chance to leverage my personal ties by whatever means they could.

  No, it was better that I stayed partly anonymous, for both the League and my family. I could help more like this. If I stayed at the back of the crowd with my head low, perhaps I could escape much notice.

  I paused at a corner, deciding which direction to go from there. A voice whispered past my ear, so familiar my heart flipped over.

  “Finn.”

  I whirled around. A couple meandering by gave me an odd look. No one else was near me. How— What—

  “Finn,” the whisper came again. “Cross the street and head east. The convenience store with the papered window.”

  That was magic carrying her voice to me. I nearly tripped over my feet as I hurried to the opposite sidewalk. I spotted the store toward the end of that block—newspaper sheets over the display window, the yellow sign cracked down the middle. When I was just a few steps away, the grimy door eased open. The face that had featured in so many of my fractured memories emerged from the shadows.

  She was here. She was really here. The girl from my memories, the girl I’d spent so many days searching for. Her deep brown gaze rested on me, as watchful as ever, but a cautious smile curled her lips. The sunburst necklace she’d held onto through the exam glinted below the collar of her maroon sweater.

  She stepped back to make room for me to come in. My legs propelled me forward with no instruction required from my brain. My thoughts were spinning. Then I was standing there amid the dusty display shelves, right in front of her.

  “Dragon-Tamer,” I said. Really it was more of a croak. I’d had some idea, when I’d imagined finding her again, that I’d stay warm but collected, as strong as she’d always been. All that went out the window.

  I reached for her and she moved to meet me, and it took all my self-control not to cling to her even more tightly than she was hugging me. My head bowed next to hers, a ragged breath escaping me. The freshly sweet smell of her dark hair filled my lungs.

  She was back. She was here. She was okay. Nothing out there, wherever the National Defense division had sent her, had broken her.

  “Sorry for the subterfuge,” she murmured against my shoulder. The fact that she didn’t seem any more eager to let go of me than I was to release her absolved me of any embarrassment. “I’m not sure how much I’m being monitored—I didn’t know how anyone might feel about us seeing each other.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I’m just glad to see you. You have no idea. I was worried about you, but I didn’t know how to get in contact—”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s hard when there’s so much you can’t talk about, isn’t it? I wish I’d— I could’ve—” She drew back slightly with a noise of frustration that echoed the emotions I’d felt so many times before. I knew without her saying anything else that she couldn’t talk about her experiences as Champion any more than I could discuss the details of the Exam.

  “Yes,” I said. “Exactly. But I—I’m so relieved to see you’re okay.”

  She smiled up at me, touching my cheek, and with the Fates as my witness, if I looked at nothing else for the rest of my life, I’d be perfectly fine with that. The impulse raced through me to lower my mouth to hers, to bring into vivid reality the kisses I could only recall vague fragments of. To have one whole memory to carry with me after this.

  Someone coughed passing by the papered window, and the girl flinched. She gestured toward the door with a quick Spanish verse sung sotto voce. The lock snapped into place.

  “We might not be able to talk all that freely, but at least we can talk in private,” she said. “This place hasn’t been used in a while. I made sure no one was following me.”

  It occurred to me that she must have ’chanted the lock open to get in to begin with. Dodging potential surveillance, jimmying locks—those were useful skills for running covert missions, no doubt. She seemed so matter-of-fact about it that I had to stop myself from staring at her.

  The people she worked for now might not have broken her, but they’d started to reshape her in just two short months.

  “How did you find me?” I found myself asking.

  “I’ve learned things…” She gestured in an offhand way that managed to indicate some distant training I could only attempt to imagine. I’d studied tracking techniques back when I still hoped to work for National Defense myself. For a mage of her skill, it couldn’t have been all that difficult to narrow down my location within the city. “It took longer than I expected,” she added. “I searched all over Manhattan first. What are you doing out here?”

  That one thing I could talk about. “Doing the work I can to change things,” I said. “There’s a group—Dampered and Burnouts and Dulls—we’re putting together a protest—I think we have a good chance of making progress if we keep at it.”

  “That’s great,” the girl said, but her voice had softened. Her gaze and then her hand rose to my temple, her fingers hovering by my Burnout mark. “Are you okay?” she asked, her eyes so solemn that a lump rose in my t
hroat.

  “Oh, you know me—I’m nothing if not adaptable,” I said. “It’s almost a relief. No magic, no pressure to work it well.”

  She didn’t look as if she completely believed that answer, but, fair enough, neither did I.

  A knot formed in my stomach as I looked back at her. I was overjoyed to see her, but it felt so wrong to be missing such a basic element of who she was.

  “This is going to sound strange,” I said, “but could you tell me your name?”

  The girl knit her brow. “My name? Why—what’s going on, Finn?”

  How could I explain when I couldn’t talk about what the examiners had done? I fumbled for the right words. “There aren’t just things I can’t talk about. There’s… I know you’re the girl I called ‘Dragon-Tamer.’ I know you.”

  “But you don’t know my name.”

  The vaguest of phrases managed to form on my tongue. “I’ve lost things. Things were taken. Bits and pieces.”

  The girl went completely still. Then she let her hand come to rest on the side of my head, near my mark. Anger sparked in her eyes. In that moment, I could see that no matter what she’d been through and how it might have altered her, she was still every bit the girl I’d fallen for.

  “They messed with your memories?” she bit out. “It’s Rocío. Rocío Lopez. And I’m the girl who’s going to make them wish they only had to deal with dragons.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Rocío

  Finn’s shoulders sagged as if the sound of my name had given him some kind of release. I tugged him to me again, absorbing the warmth from his lean body, the solidness of his presence. I’d searched for him torn between excitement at the thought of seeing him again and terror that something would have changed. But nothing had changed at all about the way he looked at me, the way he felt in my arms, or the wry tone he used to play down his problems.

  He hadn’t been able to suppress the crack in his voice when he’d mentioned the memories he’d lost.

  “How much did they take?” I said against his shirt, and then, when his muscles started to tense, “No, sorry, of course you can’t say that. Um. Possibilities, not things that actually happened. That’s one way to talk around it. What do you think they did to the other novices they burned out?”

  “I think the examiners wiped them completely,” Finn said. “Everything from after we crossed the bridge. I’ve talked to Mark—he’s still here in the city. He didn’t remember he’d ever seen me before.”

  But Finn had still known me, obviously. I breathed in the softly fresh smell of fabric softener clinging to his shirt, which I’d somehow been missing too, and shaped another careful question. “Why do you think the other Burnouts would’ve held on to less than you did?”

  “They didn’t have anyone who was willing to help them,” Finn said without hesitation.

  Someone had helped him, he was saying. But not enough for him to remember everything. Not enough for him to keep my name.

  The anger that had seared up through my chest earlier simmered higher. If the examiners had gotten their way, he’d have forgotten me completely. Forgotten everything we’d shared. Forgotten the promise we’d made to each other to fight back.

  Forgotten what he’d even wanted to fight back against.

  The examiners covered their tracks so thoroughly. Thinking about all the Burnout novices who had no idea what they’d been forced to do or what had been done to them made me queasy. They’d been stripped not just of their magic but their understanding of how they’d lost it. My hands clenched against Finn’s back.

  “I wish it wasn’t this hard to talk,” Finn said. “There’s so much I want to ask you, but I know you probably can’t give me many answers. Can you say—what are you doing in the city now?”

  “We get a break for three days once a month, now that we’re ‘settled in’,” I said. “Mine started last night. I get phone time once a week, though. After I’m back… at the college… if we decided it was safe, or if I needed to talk to you enough that safety didn’t matter anymore, I could get in touch between visits that way.”

  “You just need my number,” Finn filled in with a raw chuckle. “Do you have your phone on you?”

  “No.” It’d been sitting in my bedroom at home since the morning I’d left for the Exam. After all those weeks without it, I’d gotten out of the habit of carrying it. “I wouldn’t be able to use it anyway.” No way would National Defense let us bring private communication devices out to the base.

  Finn nodded and looked around the vacant shop as if for something to write on. My gaze followed his over the dusty shelves and counter, noting every detail, my lips starting to form a scanning casting instinctively before I caught myself.

  This wasn’t a mission. I had to shake the new habits I’d picked up in the field. My mind slipped back to Sam’s casual comment about how hard it was to come back to the regular world.

  No. I wasn’t going to let the Confed take over the whole rest of my life like that.

  I wasn’t sure I could take anything back to our new base with me. I touched Finn’s arm. “Just tell me. I can memorize the number. I’m getting very good at retaining important information quickly.” Lots of practice. At least that habit could come in handy.

  Finn made a face as if he were imagining dangerous missions where I’d needed that skill, but he recited the number to me. I repeated it to myself a few times like a casting, forming the string into a picture in my head.

  He watched me with the same clear awe as when he’d watched me actually cast during the Exam. His expression sent a tingle over my skin.

  I’d been nervous in general coming back here—bracing myself for how differently I might feel, how differently everyone might treat me. My parents had been overjoyed to see me but a little puzzled, especially by my hesitations as I figured out what to say to them about my time at the “college.” A distance had opened up between us from the moment I’d stepped onto the bridge to Rikers Island, and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever make it all the way back.

  But Finn looked at me as if I were the same person I’d always been. I hadn’t known how much I needed that confirmation until this moment.

  “We can talk more in a minute,” I said. “First…”

  I bobbed up on my toes to kiss him, gripping the front of his shirt with one hand. Finn’s arm slid around me again as he kissed me back. Heat spiked through me at the tender eagerness of his mouth, drowning out the dim, dirty store and the rumble of Saturday traffic outside.

  Why couldn’t we do this forever? Why couldn’t the rest of the world just go away?

  Once we’d started kissing, I didn’t want to stop. One kiss bled into another and then another. I pulled Finn even closer, my lips parting against his, a heady shiver rippling through me at the pleased sound that worked its way from his throat.

  Being with Finn like this was the exact opposite of everything I wanted to escape. Like a salve, inside and out, over all the parts of me that had been scraped raw by the things I’d seen, the missions I’d run, on the other side of the ocean from him. Part of me longed to fall right into him, and from the way he was holding me, he needed me just as much.

  A month. After I went back, it’d be a whole month before I’d be able to see him again. I wanted to absorb every bit of him I could to carry with me.

  The thought of how much catching up we still had to do now, how little time we might have to do it in, gave me enough motivation to ease back. Finn’s face was flushed and his eyes bright in a way that made me want to kiss him all over again. I resisted that urge, reaching into my pocket instead.

  “I got you something,” I said. “For your birthday. It was a few weeks ago, right? Since I couldn’t be here for that…”

  I handed him the small box I’d carefully wrapped this morning and then had to stuff my hands back into my pockets to stop them from fidgeting. Finn stared at the present and then at me.

  “You didn’t have to—”


  “I wanted to. I wasn’t sure what you’d even like, but I saw something—maybe it’s silly. Just open it, okay?”

  The corner of his mouth curled up at a soft angle. He opened the foil wrapping paper with a tug of his thumb and slid out the tan cardboard box. I rocked on my feet a couple times as he reached for the lid.

  Finn’s hand fell to his side with the lid. His Adam’s apple bobbed in this throat with an audible swallow.

  “It’s not silly at all,” he said. “It’s perfect. My Dragon-Tamer brought me a dragon.”

  Nestled on the foam padding was a dragon figurine about the length of my forefinger—a serpentine dragon with scales in rich greens, blues, and purples that had made me think of the dragon illusion I’d conjured, the one that had impressed Finn before he’d even known me. I’d hoped it would remind him of how strong we could be, both together and apart. I’d had no idea at the time that my dragon might be the only clear memory he had left that connected to me.

  “It’s a keychain,” I said, unable to keep myself from beaming at his reaction. “I figured it wouldn’t look too odd for you to carry it around—but of course if you don’t want to—”

  “I want to,” he said firmly, catching my gaze. “It’s— Hades take me, should I know when your birthday is?”

  How much had he lost of that frantic conversation in the tunnel when we’d been drowning out a hostile ’chantment? “It’s not until April,” I said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  He made a sound of consternation. “Well, I’ll remember it now.” With a practiced gesture, he fished out his keys and removed the leather fob with the Academy’s crest on it. “About time I got rid of this anyway,” he said in a lighter tone. “Is there anything I should know about this dragon? Special ’chantments, secret catches?”

  I shook my head. “Just a keychain.”

  His bright green eyes didn’t waver for a second. “There’s nothing ‘just’ about it.”