Neither did Oren and Olivia, who were now going through a slowed-down series of combat moves, him copying her with flawless grace.
By the time a middle-aged woman—a Renewable as well, to judge from the warm glow all around her that she wasn’t bothering to hide—came to send the kids off to their midday meal, I wanted to scream. Seeing my face, Wesley got up out of his chair with a laugh.
I felt my face warming with embarrassment, but I kept my mouth shut, chin lifting.
“Stand down, girl,” he said, still chuckling. “Matthias, stay back a moment, will you?”
One of the kids, a lanky boy of maybe ten or twelve, peeled off from the rest of the group as they all headed out of the cavern. “Yes, sir?”
“Lark’s wondering what the point is.”
“The point, sir, is that we must know how to control our magic before we can use it without hurting ourselves. We have to know our limits, and we have to know the source of our power before we can tap into it.”
“All true. Can you give Lark a demonstration of what happens when we overextend?”
For the first time, the lanky boy hesitated. “Really?” I couldn’t tell if he was excited or afraid, but whatever Wesley was asking, it was significant.
“Really. Quick now, so you don’t miss lunch.”
Matthias sat down on the mat cross-legged, laying his hands on his knees and beginning a series of deep, slow breaths. Wesley moved up next to me and murmured, “Watch.”
“He’s not doing anything,” I whispered back, confused.
“Not like that,” Wesley said. “Watch with your other sight.”
With a jolt, I narrowed my eyes, stretching out with my senses until the boy’s golden aura came into focus.
“Look closely,” Wesley said. “See if you can follow what he’s doing.”
The dark hunger inside me flared up, the longing so intense I nearly took a step toward the boy. But Wesley reached out, his own magic carefully shielded, and took my shoulder. I swallowed and forced myself to look closer.
I’d never had time to examine these auras before. Regular humans didn’t have them, possessing only the tiny sparks of magic that kept their bodies running. But Wesley was right— there was more to a Renewable’s aura than a simple golden glow. I couldn’t tell whether it was more like fine particles of dust or like dye swirling in water, but there were patterns to it. And as I watched the boy’s expression shift minutely, echoing the shifts in the magic surrounding him, I realized that he was controlling it.
Gradually, the flow of magic began to slow. At first there was as much inside him as swirling around him, but as the seconds stretched on, it seemed like more and more of the power was leaving his body. The boy was forcing it out.
With my second sight, I could actually see inside him—to where his heartbeat was growing slower, slower . . . His head sagged forward as his muscles stopped getting magic and oxygen. His lungs weren’t moving anymore. He’d stopped breathing. And then, as I watched, horror leaping up in my own chest—his heart stopped.
“Wesley!” I broke away from him and leaped for the kid, gathering my own remaining magic without thinking.
I caught Matthias as he began to fall forward, but as suddenly as his heart had stopped, it started again. He sucked in a lungful of air and sat up, eyes unfocused. He blinked a few times and then saw me and smiled ruefully. His lips were a little blue, but already growing rosy again.
“It sucks being the best one in the class at doing that,” he complained, getting unsteadily to his feet, as if he hadn’t been technically dead five seconds ago.
“Thank you, Matthias,” Wesley said. “You can go catch up now.”
The lanky boy wandered off, leaving me kneeling on the mat, bewildered. Wesley watched him go, thoughtful. I waited for him to tell me what I had just witnessed, but he seemed content with silence. Eventually, I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“What was
Wesley turned toward me, feigning surprise. “It’s perfectly safe. It takes great focus and concentration to shift all the magic away from the basic functions of the body.”
“But—his heart stopped.”
“And then as soon as it did, and he started to lose consciousness, he was no longer concentrating on draining his magic away. And it all came back again.”
I stared at Wesley, still shaken by what I’d seen. “Why teach them this?”
“In these controlled situations,” Wesley answered me, “the magic isn’t gone. The kids are just moving it around, manipulating its flow. It’s still there, ready to be tapped the second the mind fails and instinct kicks back in. But if Matthias were to use all his power on something—powering a machine, moving something large, tapping into the elements—it would be gone. He’d have to wait for it to regenerate on its own, but that’s a slow process. If he drained himself to the point of death, there’d be no magic to jump-start his body again. We do this so that they know what it feels like, how to recognize it. So they know how much they have before they start tapping into what keeps them alive.”
I closed my eyes, trying to summon the awareness that had been so infuriatingly fleeting during the morning’s meditation exercises. I tried to see how the magic flowed through me, but I could only sense it pooled within me. There was no connection to my heart, to my brain. But then, my magic wasn’t
“I didn’t show you this so you could get in touch with your own life force.” Wesley’s voice interrupted me. “Although that’s exactly how a Renewable would begin her studies, too. But you’re not like them.”
“Then why?”
He didn’t answer, but instead turned and began to lead the way toward the exit. The room was quickly emptying, and I realized with a pang that Oren and Olivia were nowhere to be seen. I turned to follow him, suddenly realizing, now that the children were gone, that I was ravenous.
But Wesley wasn’t done yet.
“I showed you,” he said as I trailed after him, “because now you know exactly what you did to that man who died. You know
I stopped short. He kept walking, the eyes on his feathered coat watching me with a hundred unblinking stares.
“And now you know how to keep yourself from doing it again.”
I saw very little of Oren over the next several days. Wesley moved my training into a private room, citing secrecy, but I knew it was at least in part because I couldn’t focus when Oren and Olivia spent half the time I was trying to concentrate rolling around on a sparring mat. Whenever I did see him, at mealtimes, he’d be sitting with her. They’d always ask me to join them when they saw me—but sometimes they didn’t even notice when I came in.
In the mornings I trained with Wesley, and in the afternoons I learned about magical theory from Parker. I struggled to get along with Wesley most days, rubbed raw by his unfailingly blunt attitude. But Parker was different. He was quiet, thoughtful, hugely knowledgeable. Though my father knew nothing about magic theory, Parker still reminded me of him. Something about the comfortable silences and insightful questions, maybe. The golden glow of his Renewable power was gentle, warm. It was easier to control the shadowy hunger within me around him.
I learned that the very first people to make a science out of studying magic were the Hellenes, the same people whose myths had inspired Prometheus. They existed thousands of years ago in a land across the ocean. It all boiled down to what their philosophers poetically called the music of the machine. In their eyes, all of nature was a machine, from the vastness of the world, with its weather and intricate ecosystems, down to the tiniest plant. A seedling machine needed magic to draw water up through its roots, just as the human machine needed it to have a heartbeat. There was magic in everything, and therefore everything could be manipulated by magic.
