Page 4

I’m awake, but I don’t have to be. I know the alarm went off, but there’s nothing really happening in school today. Maybe a test in history, but I’m getting a passing grade, even if barely. Dad can deal.

My bed is a warm cocoon of happiness, and I curl in closer, tugging my blanket around me and enjoying the warm morning sunlight flowing through my windows. I think about the girl I met yesterday, all bright eyes and sharp focus.

Mmm. Brenda. She was cute.

“KATHERINE! YOU’RE LATE!”

School. Ugh.

I pull the covers over my head, rolling into a ball; maybe Dad won’t notice I’m still here.

The door bursts open with a clang, and I can hear his heavy footsteps stomp into the room. “Aiyah, get up, it’s already 8:50! You’re lucky I had to come back from the shop and grab more supplies. I can give you a ride to school on the way back, that way you won’t miss too much class.”

He pulls the covers off me, and I grumble, bringing my knees up and hugging my pillow.

“I’ll just”—I make a vague gesture with my hand, almost completing the rune for a quick custom transport spell—“be there in a sec.” It takes about twenty minutes to walk to school, twenty minutes I could be spending sleeping.

The pillow is yanked out of my arms, and I make a noise of protest, but I don’t have anything to hide behind anymore. Reluctantly, I open one eye.

Dad’s hands are on his hips. The sunlight bounces off his big bald head, and I amuse myself watching the rays dance about.

Sam Woo (no relation to the famed barbecue mogul) is tall and broad-shouldered and powerful-looking, a guy most people assume is a bouncer or wyvern wrangler or bodyguard, but no one ever guesses he loves brewing coffee and baking pastries.

Which he should be doing right now, not hovering over me and trying to get me to go to school where they can’t teach me anything I haven’t learned already.

I hate Devonsford. I hate that Dad keeps pushing me to take Advanced Spelling, never mind that you only need Basic and Intermediate to graduate from high school.

When I transferred to Devonsford after the Pineapple Incident, Ms. Applebaum, the school counselor, happily informed me I was accepted automatically if I wanted to take it.

I hated her fake sugary-sweet “I bet your mother would be so proud!” speech.

I hate that they didn’t bother with the entrance test even with my string of dismal grades back at San Pablo.

I signed up for Basic Spelling just to see her face. She couldn’t argue that I didn’t need a Spelling class to graduate, and I’d failed three of them on purpose back at San Pablo.

I flop over, smooshing my face into the mattress, hoping that Dad will just go back to the shop.

“You get out of bed right now, and I don’t wanna hear about you doing that transport spell or wasting money on teleportation charges. You should be walking every day to school. It’s barely a mile!”

He has absolutely no sympathy for sleepy teenage girls. Especially his daughter, who’s racked up a series of multiple parent-teacher conferences where Ms. Applebaum convinced him if I don’t apply myself, I’m going to “waste my potential.”

Ugh. School is a waste of time. I’ve been at this one three months and already I know there’s nothing there worth going for. I literally have nothing to look forward to.

The prophecy made sure of that.

Then again… I do have a date Saturday.

Brenda.

I think about how enthusiastic she was about spells—I roll off the bed, a little less disgruntled now, but I keep up the act just to rile Dad up.

I take my time, groaning all the while, and Dad repeats my groans with high-pitched mockery, following me around the room while I shift through clothes in my clean pile on the floor.

Or maybe it’s the dirty pile, I don’t remember.

He’s already got a lecture going about spellwork, and I nod along blearily as I rummage for an outfit.

“You need to save your energy, you know that, and you don’t even have your license yet!

Operating original spells of that magnitude is dangerous, especially when you’re young and still learning control! ”

I’ve already used my custom travel spell three times this week, but what Dad doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Yeah, I definitely threw up afterward the first time and was pretty out of it for all of first period, but it was definitely worth it to me.

Sleep, man. It’s the best.

Plus, I know what I’m doing.

I know using original spells can be dangerous— magic itself is dangerous—and there’s really no need to.

For over a hundred years, ever since the Mayfield Breakthrough, people can cast spells without the danger or the energy cost to themselves.

No need to remember every single rune or do the complicated programming and calculations necessary for channeling raw mana, and no risk of getting hurt in the process.

Magic is a convenience, a given in our world, and there’s no need to know how it works.

And most people don’t want to. It’s the question asked by every teenager in Basic Spelling: “When am I ever going to need to use this in real life?”

But the first time I cast a simple levitation spell that I wrote, rune by rune, a thrill lit up inside me.

It had been like nothing I had felt before—the buzz of warm energy that gathered in the air, the tingling sensation as the words I spoke became tangible, heavy, and it seemed like for a moment the universe had been watching, waiting, and then—that energy did exactly what I asked it to.

The jar of coffee beans levitated from the shelf to the counter.

I was eleven, but I remember it like yesterday, catching my breath like I’d just sprinted across the room. “That’s my bou bui,” Mom said proudly, beaming at me.

It had been hard work—calculating the weight of the jar of coffee beans, the distance from the shelf to the counter, offsetting the force of gravity and the humidity of the air, all those little details written out in careful runes on a spellsheet and then activating it with a chosen command—but it was worth the satisfaction to know that I’d done it.

“You can do anything,” Mom said.

Mom would have laughed at the Pineapple Incident. She would have encouraged me to perfect the travel spell, would have tested it alongside me.

“Katherine, are you even listening to me?”

I give Dad a sarcastic thumbs-up and grab yesterday’s trousers off the floor and mismatch it with an unlaced bodice I wear over my chemise.

There’s something in the pocket, and I can’t help grinning as I trace my fingers over the weight of it.

Brenda forgot it, and it looked important, some sort of focus object, maybe.

The blue thing looked familiar somehow, but I don’t remember where I’ve seen it before.

I keep it in my pocket to remind myself something good is coming this week. I head to the bathroom to change and brush my teeth, ignoring Dad’s grumbling outside.

My hair is hopelessly tangled; I won’t have time to do anything much, especially if Dad is in a rush to get back to the shop. I try to brush through it and it catches in a snarl.

Mom’s portrait sits in a frame on the dresser. People keep saying I look more and more like her every day. She smiles at the camera, her hair smooth and shiny and perfect.

Bitterness rises in my throat; I’d already been thinking about her because of the travel spell, and now I let the memories wash over me, how Mom would help me do my hair, brushing it every night before I went to sleep.

Every few months she would sit me down in the bathroom and gently take scissors and trim it while she sang to me, even though there were plenty of instant spells for haircuts that you could buy anywhere.

I haven’t cut my hair in ages. I haven’t had the heart to let anyone else touch my hair, and the thought of some standard runebook spell doing it for me makes me nauseous.

I take a deep breath and just pull it into a messy ponytail and head downstairs.

Dad is waiting in the kitchen already, a big box in his arms full of the spells he was bottling all weekend. I’d helped, too.

I proudly peer inside at the little glass vials and their glowing contents.

He swats my reaching hand away. “No. These are for our customers.”

“Please?” I whine. “All the Pick-Me-Ups we have here are, like, a month old.”

Dad shakes his head, so I scowl and turn around.

I grab my box of cereal from the cupboard, reach in, and pull out a handful of flakes, tossing them in my mouth.

I crunch noisily as I sort through our own collection of vials in the pantry.

There’s a few more at the back of the shelf, but we go through them quick, especially me.

I grab two. One of the Pick-Me-Ups is labeled in my messy scrawl and looks shoddy next to my Dad’s neat block letters. They’re still glowing, but barely, the viscous contents of the spell weakly shimmering as I shake them.

I uncork the bottles and toss them down my throat. It’s like trying to swallow a slug. This type of concentrated potion keeps pretty well, but if you don’t use them while they’re fresh, they’ll start thickening, and they get pretty gross.

Also, downing it with a mouthful of cereal is a bad idea. I grimace but swallow the mess anyway.

As soon as the magic touches my throat I feel alert, ready.

Dad clucks his tongue at me. “Where’s your backpack?”

Right, like I need it. Though I did start an epic caricature of Mr. Vega the other day, which could be fun to finish. By the time I grab my bag and am out the door, Dad’s already powered up the horseless carriage and is gesturing at me to hurry up.

I roll my eyes, taking my time as I casually stroll to the curb.

He shakes his head as I clamber into the car. “What am I gonna do with you, huh?”

Dad sighs, pressing the quick sequence of runes on the dash that activate the spells that power the car. I sit back and watch the runes light up.

I shrug.