by Megan Crewe
My heartbeat counted the seconds until I couldn’t stand to lie there any longer. I eased upright and slipped into the hall.
The examiners had instructed us not to leave this area, and I suspected if I tried to turn the corner at either end of the short white-walled hallway, I’d have encountered a magical barrier. There was no sign of Prisha.
Trying to ignore the twist of apprehension inside me, I meandered into the men’s bathroom. I made use of the facilities and studied my bleary face in the mirror as if it would offer some sort of answer. No such luck. With a scowl at my reflection, I shoved myself back toward the hall.
Prisha was standing near the other end of the hallway, leaning against the wall with her arms folded tight. She startled at the sound of the door thudding shut behind me, and then stilled when she caught sight of me.
Relief flooded me. She was still here.
I ambled over and propped myself beside her. “You couldn’t sleep either?”
“It’s a lot to take in,” she said.
“Yeah.” She’d barely been able to speak of Examiner Lancaster’s revelations as we’d prepared for bed. She’d blasted through at least a few of the sentries herself.
All the frustrations and doubts that had been churning inside me bubbled up, threatening to spill out. How long ago had she realized the vastness of my ineptitude as I only just had, as she’d watched me in comparison to our classmates, seen the teachers favor me with so many more considerations than they would ever have extended to her? She’d known just how little I’d deserve my Chosen spot and how much more she did.
To lay that guilt on her now, to ask her to comfort me about it, would be rubbing it in her face. My throat constricted, and my mouth stayed shut.
She must have been thinking along the same line anyway. “You should get out of here while you have the chance,” she said, an unfamiliar edge hardening her voice. “With your granduncle and all, they’d probably even let you skip the burning out.”
“I wouldn’t want to skip it.” My voice came out louder than I’d intended. I reined in my emotions. “I wouldn’t accept that. If I forfeit, I’m burned out. That’s how it works.”
“Not always. Not for everyone.”
“You don’t know that. Besides, would you want a free pass you hadn’t earned, just for—”
“I didn’t want to be here at all!” she burst out. “I didn’t want any of this. Even if you are burned out, Finn, your parents will find something worthwhile you can do. You have an easy way out. You’re probably the only one here who does. So why can’t you take it? Why couldn’t you have taken it in the first place?”
I stared at her. “It wasn’t right. I couldn’t just— It wasn’t right.”
“Well, you being here doesn’t make things any more right for the rest of us. It just means something awful happens to you that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. How is that better?”
Her eyes were fierce but shining with unshed tears, and I felt more hopeless than I had in my entire life. I reached for her, and she let me pull her into an embrace. I hugged her tight.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean... If I’d known it seemed that way to you...”
“I don’t know how much it does,” she said thickly. “I shouldn’t be so angry with you. There’s just so much— I had no idea— Killing people...” She shivered. “I hate this. I hate it so much. Of course coming here wasn’t going to be enough to get me into the college. Nothing I do, with my family, with my name, is ever going to be enough for them.”
There was nothing I could say to that. I closed my eyes against the heat building in them and held on to her until she shifted away. She turned away from me and ran her hands through her hair, wincing as she must have pulled at some hurt from yesterday’s trials.
“What are you going to do?” I said.
“I’ll keep going,” she said, her jaw set. “I have to. The alternatives... But I won’t think any less of you if you don’t. I promise.”
Because she’d never expected very much of me to begin with.
“I haven’t decided yet,” I said, “but, Pree, you have to know that whatever happens to me, it was my choice, okay? I came here for me. If I stay, it’ll be for me. And I promise I won’t lean on you anymore. I won’t weigh you down.”
“Finn, I didn’t mean—”
“No, you did. And it’s fine. I just... have to figure out the best way I can live with myself, all right? I’m trying.”
“I know you are,” she said. “You always do.”
The examiners must have been honest in their declaration about us choosing to proceed freely, because I woke up to the same room, with all its walls intact and a morning-like light streaming down from a stripe across the ceiling. My head felt foggy but no longer outright painful. I stretched, and the smell of fresh baking filled my nose.
The tables along the wall were now laid with platters of fruit and turnovers and trays holding sausages and scrambled eggs. My mouth watered despite the knot of guilt still filling my stomach.
My fellow examinees were stirring. I pushed myself to my feet. I had to eat something. My abilities were feeble enough even when I was well-fed.
I’d just spooned some eggs onto a plate and moved to the sausages when Callum leaned over beside me. He cleared his throat and spat a glob of saliva into the tray of eggs.
“What are you doing?” I said, forgetting my policies about speaking to him.
Callum lobbed another splatter of spit into the tray. Then he offered me a grin so off-kilter it set the hair on the back of my neck on end. He’d always been an ass, but he’d usually been at least somewhat serious about it. Now he looked as though he was having fun.
“Maybe people don’t eat as much, or maybe I make them sick,” he said. “Either way, it weakens the competition. You have a problem with that strategy, Lockwood?”
Three days ago, I might have backed down or laughed it off to avoid discovering how he’d respond if I admitted that I did, in fact, have a problem with it—but it had been a long three days, during which I’d faced adversaries much more frightening than Callum. What could he inflict on me that was any worse than what was waiting for me afterward, no matter what I chose next?
“You don’t get a spot by enacting Medea on people,” I said, my voice low and calm. “If the only person left standing is a screwup, there’ll be no Champions this year.”
“Hmm,” Callum said. “Pot, kettle, et cetera. Anyway, the fewer losers in my way, the better. So maybe you should steer clear.”
He aimed an ironic salute at me and sauntered off.
Was that what the examiners wanted to see: total ruthlessness? I supposed brutality could be a useful quality for a soldier, but I wasn’t sure Callum had any others.
I hadn’t realized Rocío had come up behind me until she spoke. “Only one other person from his group made it this far,” she said. “I hope the last guy stays on his guard.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Assuming the experience of partnering with Callum hasn’t traumatized him into leaving.”
My gaze slid to Prisha, who was sitting on her mat with Judith. The other girl’s presence was a bit of a surprise. From the way she was cradling her broken arm, the examiners clearly hadn’t tended even to it.
Maybe Judith was, like me, still in the process of deciding whether to stay. As I watched, she fished her pearl-handled Swiss Army knife from her pocket and handed it to Prisha, who set about carving the peel off an apple in a much clumsier fashion than Desmond’s casting yesterday. I would have joined them, but after last night’s conversation, I felt suddenly uncertain of my welcome.
One of the other examinees pushed past Rocío to grab a turnover, and the corner of the sheet still wrapped around her chest drifted down her side. She groped after it, mumbling a curse in Spanish. Her fingers caught the corner, but her arm bent awkwardly as she tried and failed to tuck it back into place.
“I would be pleased to offer you my assistan
ce,” I said with a mock bow.
The corner of her lips twitched up. “I seem to need it. But let’s get out of the way first.”
We retreated to the corner near the door. I set my plate on the ground and took the end of the torn strip of sheet from her. As I lifted it, the slashes in her still faintly bloodstained T-shirt gaped open, revealing tan skin mottled by paler marks where Desmond had sealed her wounds—and a sliver of the band of her bra.
Heat crept through my body. I schooled my gaze to the cotton fabric of the sheet, wrapped the ends around her back, and tucked them in as tightly as I could, careful to avoid brushing my fingers over her bare skin.
“Thanks,” she said when I’d finished. Was her voice the slightest bit rougher than before?
She turned, tugging lightly at the strip to test it, and appeared to deem my efforts satisfactory. “I rinsed everything out last night, but I guess tying that back up without magic was more than I could manage.”
“We all have our flaws,” I deadpanned. “I’ll try not to let it color my opinion of you.”
She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. I missed the warmth of her body close to my hands.
“How do you do it?” she said. “It’s not really that what’s going on doesn’t bother you, but you make it sound like there’s nothing at all we should be worrying about. How can you keep that up?”
“Loads of practice,” I said automatically, with more honesty than I might have preferred if I’d thought my answer through. “I don’t know. When life hands you lemons, juggle them and see how many people will laugh, even if it’s only you. I find thumbing my nose at the worrying makes me feel better and makes the hard parts easier, even if I’m still worried.”
She hummed to herself. “These are some lemons we’ve got now.”
“You can say that again.” I drew in a breath to ask her what she was going to do, but I didn’t need to ask. I knew her at least that well.
“You’re staying in,” I said. “You’re going for Champion.”
She bent to pick up her plate and poked at a ring of pineapple. “I made a kind of promise to myself, the first night here, that I wasn’t going to let anyone with me get hurt. That we were all going to make it through to the end, whatever the Confed does with us after that. I can’t protect anyone if I give up. I already failed with Mark. Even with what they want us to do...” She jabbed her fork into the pineapple.
“They want us to hurt people.” Thinking about it sent my skin crawling.
“They already thought I might hurt people, somehow or other, just because I’m new magic,” she said. “If I’d known what was really going on in that test... If I could go back and do it over, find a way that didn’t prove them right... But the only good thing I can do now is keep going. As long as I have magic, I have choices. Burn me out and I’m just another ghetto-trash Dull girl.”
I couldn’t imagine there ever being anything just about her. Her words, and the confidence with which she spoke them, called a pang into my chest that recalled my first sight of her dragon.
She was so certain she had the power to save people, to make a difference.
She was right, about that and about how holding on to our talent meant holding on to possibility. No matter what the examiners said, no matter what I’d have to grapple with in the future, I’d never truly wanted to abandon that.
No. My hesitation was about what I already lacked.
“And you?” she said, in a careful enough tone that I couldn’t tell if she had hopes one way or the other.
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I want to go on. I want to keep my magic, and I want to find out how far I can make it, but...”
“But?”
The answer had been dangling in the back of my mind the entire time. Why was it so hard to force it out? “I don’t want to drag anyone else down with me if I go down.” Which I likely will.
“Finn—” Rocío began, but I motioned her silent.
“I know how much trouble I’ve already caused for the rest of you. I know I haven’t held my own. I’d be essentially useless without Prisha—and you—handling my headaches. You could have died rescuing me from that storm, and I almost massacred all of us trying to save us yesterday. And what would you all have done if I’d fainted before we reached the wall?”
Rocío’s eyes had widened. “Okay,” she said. “Everything you said might be true, but all of us needed help some of the time. You helped me right at the start, getting me on track to break my ’chantment. You figured out how to break Judith’s too. And if you hadn’t blasted the building yesterday, would we have gotten out at all? I don’t know.”
“You would have,” I said. “You’d have found a way. That’s what you do.”
“That’s not my point.” She shook her head with a fractured laugh. “Don’t you have any idea what you do? Magic isn’t the only thing that matters. The way you pay attention to people. The way you talk. The—” She waved her hand vaguely. “What you just said about lemons. I know I can survive the Exam, but it’s easier with you here. Okay?”
A blush colored her cheeks. She snatched a grape off her plate and started chewing it with intense concentration. My own face had warmed, but it was a pleasant heat, one that tingled down to my chest. “So what you’re saying is I’m the comic relief?”
She laughed properly then, hard enough that she clapped her hand over her mouth and I thought I’d made her choke. “No, I’m all right,” she said when I touched her shoulder. She coughed a few times and met my eyes again. “That’s not how I’d put it, but if you’d rather look at it that way... We all have our flaws? I’m pretty sure we all have our strengths too.”
“What is it with the throwing my words back at me today?” I protested, and she smiled. O gods—all of them—let nothing ever destroy that smile, because decades from now I’d still want to be basking in it.
A knot of doubt remained in my gut. “Fine,” I said. “But can you promise me something? I want us all to survive to the end of the Exam as much as anyone, but if I get in trouble, if you can’t get me out of it without being hurt yourself… Promise you won’t let me drag you down.”
Her expression turned serious again. “Finn, I can’t promise that.”
“I’ll almost certainly be safe,” I said with assurance I didn’t feel. “Chances are that if it looked as though I were actually going to die, they’d pull me out rather than risk my granduncle’s wrath.” That was assuming Granduncle Raymond cared much about whether I lived or died after I’d defied the Circle by coming here, but Rocío didn’t need to take that factor into consideration.
“I hope that’s true,” she said. “But whether it is or not, you have to trust me to know what risks I can take and which I can’t. If anything happens to me, it’ll be because I messed up. It won’t be your fault. Got it?”
“All right,” I said. Her declaration wasn’t everything I wanted, but it’d have to suffice. I retrieved my plate and scraped up a forkful of eggs.
Rocío ate a couple more grapes. Then she said, hesitantly, “If your family is so high up in the Confed, had you heard about any of this before: the Champions working as soldiers, or special missions overseas? I knew that the Dull government has all kinds of operations going on, counterterrorism and that kind of thing, but not that the Confed was so wrapped up in it.”
“No one in my family is directly employed by the military divisions,” I said. “Although even if they were, they wouldn’t have been allowed to mention confidential information to me. But… protecting the country is the main reason people like my dad campaigned for the Unveiling, you know? I realize they all look like jerks from your position, but many of the established mages felt incredibly guilty that they hadn’t exerted more influence in the world wars and natural disasters and all sorts of other conflicts. They knew that mages in other countries were starting to reach out to the Dull leaders of factions that oppose us. There were more wars brewing. My dad says at the time it seemed almos
t everyone had weapons that could destroy entire continents...”
“So the Confed came forward and offered their help,” Rocío said. “I’ve heard that story. I just figured the real reasons were more selfish than that.”
I made a face. “For some people they might have been, but my parents genuinely believe in the cause. And I think the Circle feels we have to continue assisting with national security as much as we’re able. Really, it’s the only activity that lets us keep peace with the magicless. If they felt we were more of a threat to them than a defensive presence... We are more powerful, but there are a lot more of them than there are of us.”
“So we’re stuck doing their dirty work.”
“Until we can shut down all the people scheming to attack us, I suppose so.”
“What are you two discussing over here?” Prisha said, strolling over with Judith and Desmond in tow. I took the teasing arch of her eyebrows as a peace offering.
“The same subject as everyone else,” I replied more easily than I would have without that gesture, and then to Judith and Desmond, I said, “I take it you two are staying in.”
Judith shrugged a tad stiffly. “Ḕ tā̀n ḕ epì tâs. If this is the way I can contribute as a mage, then that’s what I’ve got to do. I did make it this far, after all.” Her mouth slanted into a crooked smile. “My dad would probably like it. He’s always said we should be doing more to neutralize hostile mage groups.”
“I don’t know,” Desmond said. “I feel like I’ve ended up in a movie. If the Confed wants to turn me into a super soldier, who am I to say no?” He didn’t sound entirely convinced. I supposed he didn’t like his alternatives either.
“What about you?” Judith said, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t said it out loud yet. I could still decide anything.
I had decided, though, somewhere during that conversation with Rocío, even if I hadn’t spoken the words.
“I’m staying,” I said, avoiding Prisha’s watchful gaze. “I can’t let you bunch have all the fun.”
