I know a lot about you. I have been studying you for a while through this forum of yours, and let me say, I’m impressed. But I now have some tips for you.
When you are submerged in this criminal underworld, everyone is your enemy. You help these sorry excuses for masterminds become who they strive to be, but in the meantime, you are helping them gain an upper hand. You are breeding criminals, making them your equals, when really you should be degrading them, tricking them, and making them no more than an ant under your shoe. With your hand feeding these men and women, they will one day come back to bite you. And who is to blame? That’s correct: you.
With the internet at our fingertips today, it just seems too easy to get what you want. I learned the hard way. It all started with manipulating a few peers as a young lad. They were the puppets on my strings, and it has escalated since then into my now empire of deception.
Don’t get me wrong, girl. I do appreciate your efforts, but in my world, you are the ant and I am the shoe. This is no threat—just advice from one mastermind to another who has been playing this game far longer than you’ve been alive.
Best regards,
Professor James Moriarty
Sasha Alsberg has signed off.
THE BLESSING OF LITTLE WANTS
BY SARAH ENNI
Sigrid Balfour hated having to use magic to balance an enormous pile of paper while unlocking her dorm room door. In her extracurricular studies, she was just getting the hang of bending time. Using powers to prevent a clumsy disaster felt mildly humiliating.
Then, adding insult to injury, a voice from within startled her so badly that she shrieked and threw the papers into the air. Sigrid raised her hands, sheets scattering around her like a paper cut blizzard. A whispered breath and the source of the voice was flung onto the bed and pinned there.
Breathing hard, Sigrid examined her intruder. “God bleeding dammit, Thomas,” she said. He blinked, and Sigrid realized she was still holding his paralysis. She lowered her hands.
“All I said was hello!” Thomas said, stretching his arms and legs to shake off the lingering sting of magical binding. “Bit jumpy?”
Glowering, Sigrid flicked her wrist. Thomas started, clutching at his chest. He gasped an inhale. “What was that?”
“Made your heart skip a beat,” Sigrid said. “Who’s jumpy now?”
“No need to get all kinetic on me,” Thomas sniffed. He sat up and ran a hand through his helter-skelter hair, dark brown and tinged with the occasional grey. It never obeyed—Thomas looked flushed and windblown even on the clearest London day. He relaxed against the wall, as comfortable as if it were his own dorm room, which, based on the amount of time he spent here, it might as well have been.
“If you can’t stand the wrath, don’t set fire to the kitchen,” Sigrid said, bending to pick up loose sheets. She placed a stack on the desk and drew back a curtain to let in the dying sunlight. Had Thomas been sitting here in the dark?
“Did you hear that the proclamation on limiting magic passed?” he asked. “They didn’t even amend the language on practical use. Pendle Hill has the right to keep us from using the most basic spells—”
“Thomas.”
“It’s bad enough magic is stretched thin as the queen’s mustache, now—”
“Thomas!” Sigrid raised rigid half fists, threatening imminent strangulation. Thomas quieted. She pressed her hands together. “Not today. Please.”
She’d listened to some version of this rant for years. That Chancellor Duhamel and his government were conspiring with Pendle Hill leaders to scout and recruit witches born with acute natural abilities, then teach the weaker ones as little as possible to thwart their magical capacity. There was only so much magic in the world, and it ebbed and flowed as witches were born and died, learned and forgot how to be powerful. Duhamel and his cronies aimed to keep as much as possible for themselves. Three years ago it sounded like a conspiracy theory, but it wasn’t just fringe observers wondering about it anymore.
Sigrid and Thomas both curbed their substantial powers to avoid Pendle Hill’s merit award system, which involved long visits to the chancellor’s office, from which students returned quieter, more cautious. Diminished, somehow.
Thomas reached down and grabbed one of the loose sheets. He began reading in a fake British accent he knew Sigrid couldn’t stand: “ ‘In my time at Pendle Hill, I’ve learned that cooperation between witches is paramount to solving the problems facing our kind, particularly the crisis of distribution of the world’s finite supply of magic.’ ” He paused, pretending to adjust a monocle. “ ‘Diminishing magic in the United Kingdom cannot be tolerated, but only through robust negotiation can the International Chamber of Spellcraft hope to balance the needs of the many—’ ”
Sigrid groaned. “Stop, please. Filling out applications is like meeting the tax accountant you never knew lived inside you. It’s horrid.”
“I don’t know why you even bother,” Thomas said. “Any position available will be beneath your abilities.” He crumpled up the paper and tossed it to her.
She caught the wadded-up ball with a sigh. “What choice do we have?” Sigrid asked, weary. “We can’t risk letting anyone know how powerful we are. We have to do the same as everyone else—get a position, live a normal life.”
Thomas shook his head, face full of pity. He chewed the ever-present cud of khat leaf he kept tucked in his cheek. “A cubicle gig doing busywork until you retire or die? I wouldn’t call that a life.”
“The minutiae of a normal existence: Dating. Seeing friends. Yelling at said friends about what’s on telly,” Sigrid said, uncrumpling the application. She had one particular friend in mind but didn’t dare say the name: Annabel Bates. Thomas and Annabel never quite got on. As in, on speaking terms. But if Sigrid had to brave a future filled with as many trifles and as little magic as possible, the thought of meeting Annabel at the pub every night was a silver lining. She tapped the mostly empty pages. “There’s something to be said for little wants.”
“I’ve seen what you can do,” Thomas said quietly. “What we’re both capable of. I don’t think we could have ‘little wants’ if we tried. We need to do something—something big. We need to make a change.”
“You sound like my father.”
“Your father was a great man.” Thomas shrugged.
Sigrid looked away. “Not to me.”
Annabel appeared in the doorway and knocked gently. “Sorry—is this a bad time?” Sigrid sat up straight. Annabel’s lips were pink and puckered as a petal, her hair a shining sheet of golden brown.
“It’s a fine time,” Sigrid said, flashing a bright smile.
“Have you had a minute to look over my CV?”
Sigrid slapped her forehead. “Ugh. I forgot, Bel. I’m sorry.”
Annabel glanced at Thomas’s satchel by the bed, spilling books onto the floor. “Too busy at the library?”