The cop nods. “Very good. We’ll need a few words with her when you’re done.” He ventures off, and I don’t know if I feel relieved or more panicked.
Patrol turns to me. “Where were we?”
Definitely more panicked.
“You’re in violation of using magic outside Ghizoni borders.” He slips a silver restraint from his pocket and leans in for a whisper. “Not to mention illegal use of a transport spell to the human world in the first place.”
I hide my wristwatch arm behind me. Bri won’t take the fall for this too.
“Come along without making a scene or this will get far worse. For you. For everyone.”
There’s no way out of this. No way good.
“I’m not going anywhere with you.” Darkness creeps at the edges of my vision and I sway. But blinking quickly seems to help. I think. I hope.
Patrolman tilts his head. He noticed.
He pulls down his shades. “Who did you touch?” He spits words like they’re laced with poison.
“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about. I ain’t do nothing.” Do I have rights in Ghizon like here? Not that that shit matters half the time.
He glances both ways. “I said—”
If Patrol in Ghizon are anything like the Laws here, talking won’t do shit.
He reaches for me.
And I run.
My feet fly across the pavement, my block a blur of color. I dart across the street, hiking over a garbage can, knocking it down behind me. My heart pounds faster than my feet. Footsteps echo at my back.
An alleyway between the laundromat and Klassy Kuts barber shop opens up ahead and I pound the ground harder. I saved my sister’s life and somehow that’s a crime. My lungs burn and my thighs cry in pain as I run. Because that’s just what you do when Laws are after you. Guilty or not, you just run.
My wrist vibrates and I can’t manage a look. Maybe I can lose them, get back to Ghizon, act like I’ve been there the whole time. They don’t have shit on me. They can’t prove anything. Would they even have to?
The sound of my heaving breaths echo off the towering apartments around me. I chance a glance over my shoulder and all is clear. So I stop to catch my breath and check my watch.
Bri: Dorms are closed. Meet at my house?
I try to shoot off a reply when a hand as cold as death clamps around my wrist.
“I said come with me.” His silver restraints coil around my wrists like a braided rope, then harden into shiny metal. “The Chancellor intends to see you. Now.” Patrolman lifts his sleeves, and the orb in his wrist glows. With a winding swish of his hand, the cuffs on my wrists cinch tight. I hold my chin up. He won’t see me struggle.
“Fine, take me to see him. I did the right thing. I saved someone’s life.”
“A human life.” He chortles. “And you think that matters?”
CHAPTER 3
IT’S CALLED A CHASER. What you’re feeling.” Patrolman leads me, cuffs first, down the alley, deeper into the shadows. “The lightheadedness, dry mouth. Happens because you’re Bound. The first time you touch a human.” He loops his arm into mine and presses his hands together and I stare confused.
“Don’t you read? Go to class?”
Yeah, asshat, I do. “Uh, a year of magic school doesn’t make me an expert on the topic.” Excuse me for missing out on the last century of how shit works.
He ignores the snide remark. His fingers tremble as a ball of light sparks between them, unsettling the dust in the alleyway around us. “When one of the Sacred Statutes is broken the first time,” he says, raising his voice over the rumbling vortex in his hands, “touching humans being the most serious of them… the perp’s magic backfires, almost like a poison emitted into your bloodstream.”
A perp? Is that what I am now?
“Unless you get an antidote.” Something he does with the corners of his mouth makes me doubt an antidote is in my future. They would let me die for touching someone? My own sister?
“It’s supposed to slow the perp down until we find them.”
“And then what?”
“And then”—the alley glows blinding white, his magic dissolving the faded brick walls around us—“you reap what you sow.”
I part my lips to speak, but he mutters the transport spell. The air swallows us, and in a blip, we’re gone.
* * *
Over the Ethiopian highlands, south of the Serengeti, thousands of nautical miles off the coast of Madagascar, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet is a hidden land I ain’t never seen on a map or in some history book. But I’ve slipped beyond that invisible curtain of open ocean before, to a hidden place nestled at the base of Yiyo Peak, a mountain so tall it kisses the afternoon sun. It is Ghizon, home to a clan of magic-wielders. Self-proclaimed gods. Their magic gives them that stink of uppity.
For several moments I feel squished all over, like I’ve forced my entire body into skinny jeans several sizes too small. Waves of memories of being whisked away to Ghizon the first time, when Moms’s blood was barely cold, threaten to drown me. The pops of gunshots, her open-eyed stare… it all comes rushing back. I don’t want to relive it.
As my feet set on the ground in Ghizon, the past calls to me.
And I give in.
CHAPTER 4
Eleven Months Ago
THE SUN SHOULDN’T BE allowed to shine every day. Some days it needs to sit its ass down somewhere and let it be gray.
In my pocket, I roll the worn edge of a photograph of Moms—one of the few things I had time to grab—back and forth between my fingers. I tug my jacket tighter over me and take an incremental step forward. The line for Sorting and Binding—finding out which caste I’m assigned to and having magic fused to my skin—isn’t super long, but waiting isn’t my idea of fun. Not ever, but especially not now.
Pop.
Pop.
I shake off the memory of Moms hitting the ground and swallow my lunch back down, taking another tiny step forward.
Celebratory banners in deep purples and jade sway in the breeze and a band of Ghizoni play curved horns that look like elongated elephant tusks onstage. The crowd moves to the rhythm, waiting for the designations to begin.
Steel and glass buildings tower around me. New Ghizon’s Central District is full of cloud-blocking buildings tucked tight together with narrow alleyways between. Giant screens hang from the glassy skyscrapers and the words DESIGNATION DAY dance on their glass. The words dissolve every few seconds, replaced by flashes of the crowd waving, fingers twisted into what looks like a knot held over their hearts.
Bursts of sparkle erupt over the crowd, glittering in the high sun. At first, seeing people conjure things out of thin air, bend animals to their will, shift and move and change things with magic wowed.
Now, it just annoys.
I’m not one of them.
Patrol lines the outskirts of the audience, their fingers glued to their chests too. No idea what the gesture means, but judging by their reverent stares, it’s some allegiance type shit.
The only other brown face in this place… in this world… is on the corner of the amphitheater stage in a too-small chair. The man I basically just met. The one Moms laid up with to make me: Aasim.