Ruthless Magic

by Megan Crewe

  Lacey spotted him too. She slashed her whip toward him with a lyric more shrieked than sung.

  The force she channeled through the weapon walloped the boy so hard he toppled head over heels. His body crashed to the ground and stayed there, motionless.

  I swallowed a sound of protest. The magical presence contracted around me with a frantic but worryingly thin quivering.

  What? I thought at it. What’s wrong with you? Or was it something wrong with me? Had I drained myself without realizing it, and it was my hearkening that had weakened, not the magic itself? I didn’t feel that tired.

  Across the clearing—the arena?—a few of the other examinees were facing off. One girl stopped her casting with a shake of her head and simply threw herself at her opponent, fingers clawing and knees jabbing. Queasiness filled me.

  Was this what the examiners really wanted? What would make them happier: if I danced to their tune and threw myself into the fighting like the ghetto-magic upstart they’d pegged me as or if I refused their test altogether?

  I didn’t give a damn. Al carajo with their tests and their judgments. All that mattered was whether I could live with myself after today.

  “We’re fine for now while they’re ignoring us,” Desmond pointed out, “but this isn’t the most strategic standoff spot. I like the feel of the hills over that way.”

  He motioned with his thumb toward the slopes molded like dunes on the other side of the central spire.

  “I’m all for strategic,” Finn said. “Shall we run for it?”

  That would be faster than me trying to teleport them one at a time, if the magic could even support that many major castings right now. “Stay close to me,” I said. “Get ready to help me hold up our shield if someone decides to come at us.”

  Finn nodded.

  The sheathed knife was starting to feel uncomfortably heavy in my hand. I didn’t want to use it, but I didn’t want to leave it for someone else either. I settled for shoving it between my shoulder blades under the strip of torn sheet that was holding my shirt together.

  We all dragged in a breath, and then we took off.

  A faint smoky smell had started to saturate the air amid the crackles and cries. The false sun overhead beat down, baking my dark hair. I sprinted toward the first rise beyond the central spire, maybe two hundred feet away, my hand on Desmond’s elbow. Prisha gripped his other arm.

  We’d just passed the spire when a girl with tear-streaked cheeks and a stream of burgundy dreadlocks leapt after us. She held no weapons, and her eyes were wide. “Please,” she said, panting. “Can I join you?”

  Prisha frowned, but Finn made an unfamiliar gesture with his fingers and nodded. “She’s okay.”

  I motioned the girl over. The more of us stayed together, the more protection we could provide each other. And the more likely some of the others would change their minds and join us too.

  We clambered over the slope and slid down the other side.

  I turned, surveying our surroundings. The trench was steep in front of us but more gradually slanted at our backs, giving us a solid wall to hide behind and an easy escape route if we needed to retreat. Although there was nothing to retreat to other than the next trench.

  Desmond nodded with apparent satisfaction. The girl with the dreadlocks stood a little apart from us, as if she wasn’t ready to completely let down her guard. Then she edged closer.

  “Hi,” she said with a soft, rounded accent. “I’m Leonie. Thanks for—for not blasting me to Hades and back.”

  Desmond cocked his head. “Do I hear a little New Orleans?”

  Her eyebrows rose. “New Orleans by way of Houston, thanks to the Academy. Good ears.”

  “I’ve got cousins down there.”

  Finn cleared his throat and pointed over the rise. “Here comes trouble.”

  Callum was climbing down the central spire, his red hair stark against the ivory even in the platform’s shadow. His head swiveled. He’d seen us.

  But he must have spotted someone else that seemed a better target, because he stopped partway down and pressed himself against the stalk, peering in a different direction. He pulled an object I couldn’t make out from his pocket and hurled his arm forward as if sending an army into a charge.

  The air shrieked and shimmered. Something crashed; someone squealed. And the magical presence around me didn’t just contract but shrank.

  It was almost as if the castings aimed to destroy were hurting the magic itself.

  I went still. What if it was that? The magic in here was just as trapped as we were, and I could feel it as solidly as I could feel any of the people beside me. It had shown intent. It had helped me—in the windstorm and the trap of vines. Like a conscious thing.

  Judith had said that no one knew exactly what the world’s magic was or why we could use it the way we did. Maybe that was because all this time, we’d simply failed to recognize a very different but no less real living creature.

  “The castings,” I said. “Every ’chantment and conjuring that’s breaking things, hurting people... I think they’re killing the magic too.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Finn

  If someone had suggested that I’d murdered every drop of water I’d ever drunk, I’d have found that only marginally harder to accept than the proposition that magic was something we could kill.

  “Killing the magic?” Prisha’s tone conveyed similar disbelief. “What are you talking about?”

  Rocío’s gaze was distant. “I told you before I could feel something strange in it,” she said. “The feeling has kept getting stronger. Something in the magic doesn’t like what’s happening here in the Exam. I think it was trying to tell me, to get me to notice it, from the first morning, but I didn’t understand until now. The more we cast destructive spells, the weaker it gets, and the more... shaky, I guess. Scared.”

  The whisper of magic around me didn’t feel much different from how it usually did, but Rocío had to be infinitely more attuned to it than I was. Still…

  “Wouldn’t someone else have noticed before now?” I said.

  “The magic in the arena is cut off from the rest of the world,” Rocío said. “Right? There’s just a tiny portion of it in here. Out in the world, the impact would be so spread out it’d be hard to pick up on the change. But here, anything that hurts that energy hurts it badly.”

  “You’re talking about magic as if it’s alive,” Prisha said.

  “I think maybe it is.” Rocío’s voice dropped. “I know how crazy that sounds, but it seems to... to want things, to care about things. It’s warned me, helped me. I’m not saying it’s, like, some huge creature wrapped around the planet. But maybe it’s millions of little bits of life that are all connected? Isn’t that possible?”

  “‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,’” Desmond murmured. “Any sufficiently advanced life form could be too.” He laughed. “I never thought— Wow. If that’s true, we’d have to rethink everything.”

  “Even if it’s only obvious here,” I said, “the Confed must know. The Exam committee would observe the effect, and—”

  I cut myself off. And what? I wasn’t certain even the Circle was aware of half of the Exam committee’s undertakings.

  “Maybe the examiners do know,” Rocío said, echoing my thoughts. “Maybe it’s one more thing they decided to keep secret from everyone else.”

  The new girl, Leonie, scratched at a broad burn mark that marred the olive-brown skin of her forearm. I recalled speaking with her briefly in the courtyard, but so much had transpired since that morning four days ago that I couldn’t dredge up anything about her other than what she’d just told us.

  “When it’s just us family, my grandmother talks that way about the magic,” she offered. “As if it has a mind of its own. MawMaw always says to think of casting more as bargaining than creating.”

  The sun was blazing now like Helios himself. The dunes were too low to
provide much shade. I swiped my damp hair from my forehead and registered the quiet around us. Not a single grunt, cry, thump, or crackle carried in the air.

  It didn’t much matter whether the magic were alive if we didn’t stay the same.

  “Something’s up,” I said. “They’ve stopped fighting. And I’m going to guess it’s not because peace has suddenly come into everyone’s hearts.”

  We eased up, leaning against the gritty surface of the slope that sheltered us, to peer over the top. There was no one in view across the arena except the bodies of the two examinees Lacey had felled. Then I spotted the flash of Callum’s red hair. He was ducking out of one of the hovels, clutching a slingshot.

  Another boy, the one with dark curls who’d been battling Lacey, emerged from a different hovel. He’d retrieved a box that looked like the first aid kit Desmond had found. After he’d tucked it into an emptied food sack slung over his narrow shoulder, he and Callum exchanged a glance. Callum headed left, and the curly-haired boy went right, toward the next of the small black structures.

  I did not at all care for the looks of that. “They’re gathering the supplies the examiners left for us,” I said.

  “That doesn’t bode well,” Prisha muttered. “Are there any we can get to first?”

  “The shacks are all pretty far from the dunes,” Rocío said. “And we don’t know which ones they’ve already emptied. I’m not sure it’s worth the risk of going out there and making ourselves a target.”

  “I’d vote for no,” Desmond said. “Weapons can’t beat magic. We’ll stay rested while they wear themselves out fighting each other.”

  Rocío nodded, but her mouth was tight. She’d rather they didn’t fight each other either, I knew.

  Of course, they weren’t fighting each other at the moment. I’d gotten the distinct impression that Callum and the other boy were working together.

  We waited, watching, as the artificial sun beat down on us. After several minutes it became clear that two other examinees were searching the hovels too: the tall, bulky guy who’d apparently survived being in Callum’s group all the way to the end and a girl with raggedly chopped brown hair who carried a hatchet shoved under her belt. I was pretty sure the guy had been on the new-magic side that first morning, but the girl had been with the San Francisco Academy group. She’d had a long, sleek ponytail then.

  They stalked methodically across the arena, not talking to each other but offering occasional gestures of acknowledgement. My spirits sank. We had five and they four, but those four subscribed to Callum’s brutal methodology.

  Sweat slicked down my neck and back. The edge of the pool shimmered faintly beneath the central spire. I swallowed against the dryness in my mouth. Áriston mèn hýdōr. We’d never retrieved our breakfast, but if the heat didn’t let up, it was thirst that would spell our doom first.

  The girl with the hatchet finished her rounds. She hauled her sack over to the central spire, clambered up it with a speed that made me tense, and dropped a few more bags over the edge of the platform. When she’d climbed back down, she sat with her back against the stalk on the opposite side from the fountain. She pawed through one of the food sacks and started peeling open a wrapper.

  A different figure slipped into view just then. A boy so slight he looked scarcely thirteen darted across the open ground to the fountain. I recognized him from the first morning too—even remembered his name: Jamie, from the Seattle Academy. He’d been flushed with a giddy mix of nerves and anticipation.

  His face was pallid now, his steps wobbly. He must have believed the coast was clear, as he didn’t even glance over at the girl sitting in the spire’s shadow. I suspected he’d held out as long as he could bear. He didn’t bother with the taps but simply collapsed at the edge of the pool and began scooping water into his mouth.

  The girl with the hatchet raised her head. Beside me, Rocío stiffened. Her lips moved to shape a casting, but I doubted any of us anticipated how swiftly the girl would move. She whipped onto her feet and around the spire’s stalk, snatching her hatchet from her waist.

  Jamie didn’t have the chance to so much as look up. The girl screeched out a conjuring that slammed him forward into the pool. Then she rammed the flat of the hatchet’s blade down on the back of his head.

  Nausea shot through me, and a strangled sound escaped Rocío’s lips. She leapt up but caught herself on the crest of the slope, her fingers gripping the yellow-brown surface. Hades knew there was no helping the poor kid now.

  The girl with the hatchet straightened up. Jamie’s body bobbed on the ripples still stirring where he’d hit the water. Her shoulders shuddered. She clenched her hands and dipped the head of the hatchet into the water to rinse off the blood. Then she strode around the spire, hefted her sack of supplies and the others of food, and disappeared from sight.

  “Goddamn,” Leonie said.

  No words I had seemed adequate. Rocío slid lower on the slope again. I took her hand, twining my fingers with hers. She leaned into me, but her gaze was still trained on the rest of the arena.

  Callum and his other companions had headed off too. The back of my neck prickled. They knew where we were holed up. They were carrying out some activity they didn’t want us to see.

  Time ticked away from us, and they didn’t reemerge. “I don’t like this,” I said. “They’re planning something, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s to do with us.” There weren’t many other people left besides those four and Lacey, wherever she’d absconded to. Actually, there might not be any others left.

  Prisha anxiously twisted a strand of her hair around her finger. “Should we spread out a bit and see if we can spot them?”

  Rocío sucked in her lower lip. “All right. But let’s keep each other in sight. We’ve gotten this far by having each other’s backs. I don’t want to lose that advantage.”

  “With my ankle, I think I’d better man the fort here,” Desmond said. He looked toward Leonie. “Stick around so we can keep two sets of eyes on watch?”

  “I can handle that,” she said, tossing back her dreadlocked hair.

  Rocío’s grip tightened on my hand for long enough to make my heart squeeze with it. Then she slipped away to the right. Prisha followed her, peering over the rolling landscape behind us. So I headed left.

  Rocío had been wrong. There were hovels near the dunes—or at least there was one. It stood just beyond the nearest spire, which had hidden it from our original position. The structure would make a good observation point without taking me too far from the others.

  My dragon-tamer had been right that working together made us stronger, though. The whisper of energy in the air shifted around my movements, and I wondered if that wasn’t the way all magic operated as well, whether it was alive or not. It let us work with it, let us conduct its energy to our intent when we matched the rhythms of its flow.

  What Rocío had said about the magic actually made a lot of sense when I thought of it that way. Taking something so harmonious and making it destroy parts of the world that sustained it—why wouldn’t that harm the magic in turn or weaken the power it could channel?

  A symphony could suffer for a single off-key note. It would be stranger if the magic remained unaffected by how we used it.

  I came up parallel with the hovel, hesitated, and scrambled over the slope. When I glanced back, I could still see Desmond’s dark head and Leonie’s mass of dreads where I’d left them, but as I crept toward the hovel, the spire concealed them. They’d hear me if I hollered, though. Desmond might even be following our movements in his surreptitious ways. I doubted he was using his literal eyes to monitor our surroundings.

  The hovel’s doorway faced the dunes. I peeked inside. Evidently, Callum’s group had either missed this one or been too cautious to venture so close to our hideout. A metal mallet little larger than my hand lay on the ground amid the sweltering heat inside.

  I scooted in, grabbed the tool, and yanked myself back out before I had to
inhale that heavy air. Wedging the mallet’s handle into my empty pocket, I edged to the side of the hovel to peer around it.

  My legs locked. The four we’d observed earlier were gathered beside one of the shorter spires, obscured by the shadow of its platform. They’d all fashioned belts from strips of the sack fabric, which now held their extra weapons at their waists. The boy with the dark curly hair had wrapped a numbing bandage around his right bicep and elbow.

  As I watched, the bulky guy’s mouth moved and Callum waved his hand. They were too distant for their voices to be audible, but the ground between them and me offered no cover.

  I was still a mage, wasn’t I? Uncovering their schemes was worth expending a little of the limited energy I had left.

  I recited a poetic line sotto voce, focusing my attention on the air near my ears. It took more concentration than I’d expected to modulate my melody and shift the magic into an amplifying cone.

  My headache woke up, piercing the back of my skull. Then Callum’s brusque voice reached me.

  “What’s there to agree on? Taking out the wimps is simple. I’ve already done half of the job for you.”

  “You can’t know for sure they’ll make us all Champion even with everyone else gone,” the girl with the hatchet said.

  “If we get rid of that last bunch, it leaves the four of us and what’s-her-face,” Callum said. I assumed he meant Lacey. “The Confed wants their special soldiers. Do you really think they’re going to cull more of us after all this?”

  “We can decide how we deal with each other after,” the bulky guy said. “I don’t care, as long as the freaks who can’t even be bothered to fight don’t get our places.”

  “It’ll be even easier taking them down with them all clinging so close together,” Callum said. “We surround them, and they’re not going to be able to defend against all of us at the same time.”

  “Are you sure you can hold up your end?” the curly-haired boy said in a nasal sneer. “I saw your last castings. You’re almost out of juice.”