Ruby. Like some silent movie playing inside Grace’s head, Ruby takes the train, smiles delightedly, and then bends down to run it in a circle around herself on the floor of Grace’s mind.
I gasp, tears coming to my eyes, and the mental connection between us pinches out. I open my eyes to find Grace smiling at me.
“I’ve never experienced anything like that.”
“Me neither. Maybe Gunn’s onto something,” she says. “I’ve never been able to imagine something like Ruby from virtually nothing. You want to try again?”
And I do. Instead of feeling stretched, exhausted, I weirdly feel invigorated. “We’ll start inside your mind this time.”
So after a quick break, we run through five more image volleys, finding the image in the mind of the first sorcerer and then building on it in the mind of the second, like we’re creating a mental bridge, image by image, connection by connection. I’m slow to start, but by the third round, I feel comfortable walking inside Grace’s theater, knowing where to find her stage. And before I know what hit me, Gunn’s calling out to the crowd, “Supper time!”
“Thank God, I’m starving.” Grace stretches her arms over her head. “Come on, it’s been a long day.”
But I’m not ready to stop. It’s like someone’s cracked open a long-locked door, given me a glimpse of a room that glitters inside, started a ticking clock for proving myself worthy of entering. “It’s all right, you go on, I’ll catch up.”
“You serious?” She studies me. “Joan, you’ve got to give yourself a break.”
“So I’ll break when I deserve one.” When Grace just looks at me doubtfully, I say, “I’m fine, honest. I’m not even hungry. Trust me, I just need a little more time.”
“All right,” Grace says. “But don’t burn yourself out on the first day.”
She filters out of the clearing with the rest of the crowd, past Gunn and Dawson and back into the woods. But before the gangsters turn to go, Gunn spots me, alone in the corner. He approaches, no sound but his loafers tramping over the grass. “Supper time, Joan,” he reminds me.
I take a deep breath. “I thought I’d spend a little bit more time practicing alone, sir, if that’s all right.”
He stops in front of me. “Did my teamwork demonstration not register?”
“It did,” I say slowly, remembering that this man stole two lives here in the clearing this morning. But I’m not ready to stop sorcering. I need every minute I can get. I need to become stronger, better. So I carefully give his words back to him. “But a team’s only as strong as its weakest player.”
Gunn studies me for a long time, a smile in his eyes that never quite touches his lips. “Very well.”
He walks out of the clearing, and I turn back inside myself, hungry to try another trick, one that I spotted some of the Carolina Boys attempting earlier. I focus on my hand, on willing it warm, and imagine my palm heating, igniting. I close my eyes and whisper, “Spark and fire.”
It takes a second, and then another, but then I feel a sharp, stinging burn, like a snapped match against my palm. I gasp. And there, jumping and throbbing against my palm, like a captured frog from a lake, is a small sphere of orange fire.
NEW ALLIANCES
ALEX
I’ve been at Lorton Reformatory for three weeks, two days, and four hours of my six-week sentence for “attempting to sell magic contraband,” booked under the guise of running some of Danfrey Pharma Corp.’s remedial magic inventory around town. I’d swear it’s been three years, but that’s impossible, because I’ve been keeping track of everything. Twenty-two breakfasts staring at rows of inmates in sad gray jumpsuits hunched over metal trays. Twenty-two long mornings of making clay batter and shaping bricks in Lorton’s brick-making unit. Forty-four hours toiling around in the crisp fall air in the quad, waiting for someone to offer a smoke or a handshake.
But no one does. Because I’m an island here. An island in a foreign, treacherous sea. A sea I’m constantly treading, because if I relax for a second, I might find myself with my face to the floor. It’s minimum security, mind you—no one in here’s doing hard time for hard crime—but that somehow makes it worse. As if everyone’s out to prove to the underworld that they’re on their way to bigger, badder things.