I have no supplies.
No food.
No shelter.
There may or may not be water in the ground, depending on when the last rain was. My magic may or may not be strong enough to find it.
And a family will die if I don’t do something.
Chapter Seventeen
“You are stronger than you think.”
—A Season for Everything
My clothes are damp with sweat. My jean shorts are soaked through, and my tank top clings to my skin. It is so hot.
For a while, I don’t move from my spot in the field. The winter sun makes me feel as if I’m hallucinating, it’s so eerily low in the sky. It should be high above me to produce this kind of heat, but it stays close to the horizon. It’s so bright.
Too bright for winter.
I push myself up. My legs shake when I stand, and everything spins. I take several deep breaths and walk over to the woman. Each step is work, as if my ankles are bound in weights. I curse myself for not eating breakfast this morning and try not to think about how the last time I ate or drank anything was last night.
“What’s your name?” I ask when I reach the shader. Neither of her kids is standing anymore; they’re both lying on the ground, chests rising and falling rapidly. They can’t be more than eight years old.
“I want to go home,” one of them cries. They either don’t notice me or are too weak to care that I’m here.
“I’m Angela,” the woman says. “I need help getting them down, please.” Her words are fast and strained. “It kept getting hotter and hotter, and they just got too weak to move.” She’s crying now, large tears running down her cheeks.
There’s an empty water bottle on the grass between her kids. “Do you have any more water?”
She shakes her head.
“Okay, Angela, I’m Clara. I’m going to help you.” There’s a sweatshirt hanging out of her day pack. “You have to get your kids out of the sun. Take them to the rocks, and find a stick to use as a pole—you can shove the hem of your sweatshirt into the crevices between the rocks and put your hood over the stick to create some shade. You don’t want them to burn any more than they have already.”
“No, no, we need to get them down the mountain, to the main road. They can’t stay in this heat.”
I glance over at the sunbar and lower my voice. “Unless you want to climb the rock face, we can’t. The only other way out is blocked. Do you see that glimmer in the distance? The way the air looks somewhat distorted?” She nods. “It’s called a sunbar. Witches use it to train; it’s basically a thin wall of intensely focused sunlight. You can’t walk through it.”
“But I saw someone with you—I know I did. Can’t he help us?”
I take a deep breath, and rage roils inside me as I think of Mr. Burrows and his reckless test. “He’s gone,” I say.
Angela’s eyes get wide. She angles away from her children. “Are you saying we’re stuck here?” She gets the words out through clenched teeth.
“Yes.”
Her breaths come quickly, and she chokes. “We have to get them out of here. You have to help me.”
Their skin is red, and they look lethargic, fully exposed to all 115 degrees of heat.
“There isn’t anywhere for us to go,” I say as gently as I can. “Get them in the shade, and I’m going to look for water.”
“Where?”
“In the soil. In the grass. Over the rocks. Wherever I can.”
Angela stares at me for a few seconds before realization hits. “You’re a witch.”
I nod. “Get them into some shade.”
One of her kids starts crying as she coaxes them up and moves them to the rocks. I grab their empty water bottle and turn away. I’m getting dehydrated, and with how much I’ve been sweating, everything’s accelerated.
There is nothing I can do in this heat. I can barely think. But the sun will set soon, and the long winter night will cover us.
Water. I need to find water.
Witches can’t be burned by the sun, but we can still suffer from exhaustion and heatstroke. In this kind of heat, without any shelter, I could survive without water for three days, if I was lucky. But the shaders don’t have that kind of time.
Mr. Burrows will come back before the risk to them is too great. He has to.
When the only thing left is your magic, when that’s all you have to rely on, you’ll learn to respect it.
That’s when I fully understand the test. Mr. Burrows purposely put shaders at risk to force me to use my magic, knowing they won’t survive without it.
Part of me wants to die out here just so Mr. Burrows has to deal with the consequences, but he’s not worth it. And I refuse to let this family suffer.
I turn back and see Angela hurrying toward her kids with a long stick. She pounds it into the dirt and gets her sweatshirt stretched out between the rocks and the stick. She carries her kids under the makeshift tent.
I walk farther away, listening for anything that sounds like water. But there’s nothing.
I reach for my magic. It’s faint and weak, but at least there’s something. Maybe I just need to sit down again.
I lower myself to the ground and shove my hands into the dirt. I take a few deep breaths and send my magic into the earth, the icy feeling cooling my insides. It makes my thoughts just a little sharper. But it doesn’t have the aggressive rush I’m used to during winter. It’s slow and heavy, reacting to the heat. My body is so busy trying to cool itself down that there’s hardly any energy left for magic. It crawls out of me and along the dirt as if in slow
