Chapter 1 - The Facility

Northern Facility, Vanstead Dukedom of Augustein, Year 984

Ben was crying again. Amara shifted under her thin blanket, wincing as the movement caused some of her wounds to press into the cold stone floor. At least the bandages stayed secure; the magicians always made sure every cut was well dressed after their “sessions.” It was “to prevent contamination,” they said.

Rolling onto her stomach, Amara peered through the thick darkness of their cell. On the other side of Susie and Ellie’s curled forms, she could just barely make out a trembling silhouette facing the wall. Amara frowned as another soft sniffle reached her ears. Ben had gotten a lot quieter at crying since he’d arrived, but the boy could never quite hide it completely.

Amara glanced around at the other still figures in the cell, so closely packed together that they covered nearly the entire floor in motionless lumps. People learned quickly to sleep still. There wasn’t the space to thrash around, and most kids got so tired after sessions that it was easy to fall unconscious.

From what she could tell, it didn’t seem like anyone else had woken up. Amara squinted over at Ben again, briefly considering getting up to console the boy, but she hesitated. She wouldn’t really have anything to say to him, and besides, she’d wake up the others if she tried, she told herself.

Amara laid her head back down on the ground. When she’d first been taken to the facility, she hadn’t been able to sleep on the hard surface, but now she found the ever present chill a comfort. She closed her eyes and ignored the sniffles.

It would be fine, she told herself. Ben was relatively new. In a couple more weeks, he’d stop crying like the rest of them.

—

They introduced themselves with big names that Amara had been too tired and too scared to remember. One moment she’d been sleeping on a soft bed, and the next she’d woken to a blur of shifting figures and yells. In that frantic jumble of alien surroundings and sensations, it had been difficult to parse information. But she remembered them saying that they were “licensed as court magicians” and that they’d brought her there “for a great purpose” on the orders of the Sovereign, so Amara had always called them “the magicians” in her head. She’d heard some of the other kids call them “doctors,” but she knew that word was for people who healed, so she didn’t use it.

Amara thought her parents might have been doctors, once. It was hard to remember. The longer she spent in the grey walls of the facility, where only faint torchlight touched and the brightest color was Susie’s ginger hair, the more the days blurred into an endless stream of sleep, sessions, food, and more sessions. These days, the most she remembered were the few flashes that appeared in her dreams. Little huts lining a dusty street, swaying yellowed grasses, and fuzzy figures passing in and out of her vision.

More and more Amara was beginning to wonder if maybe she’d always been in the facility and there was nothing else outside of it. The only thing that kept her somewhat grounded, that assured her that she wasn’t imagining another past, was the presence of James, the one person in the cell who’d been there for a longer time than her.

He was a quiet boy. Most of the time he would simply sit in the corner of the cell and stare at the wall, never speaking or acknowledging anyone. Susie had gone up to him once, and the boy hadn’t even twitched when she started talking. Amara didn’t blame him. If anything, she felt a sort of camaraderie with the boy.

Out of everyone in the cell, the two of them were probably the oldest. It was hard to know when neither of them remembered their ages, but they were taller than the other kids, so that was the assumption. And being the oldest and the ones who’d been there the longest came with a certain mutual understanding that existed even in the vast spaces of silence.

—

One benefit of being there so long was that the better Amara’s pain tolerance grew, the more she could understand during “sessions.”

“Maximum output has reached 17, surpassing the previous record.”

“What about the variability? Has that changed again?”

At first, she’d always squeezed her eyes shut, but now Amara kept them open, both to prepare for what was happening next and to stare at the magicians’ faces. Their eyes were always focused and sharp. There was a detached, unwavering quality to them that she thought she might’ve found inspiring in a different context. Now, all it did was stir up a cold, simmering feeling deep in her gut that was constantly on the edge of boiling, a feeling she pushed down and kept bottled as tightly as she could.

“It’s lowered again, sir.”

“Fascinating. Perhaps the artificially increased output has destroyed the magic’s control and self regulation. Run a few more tests. I want to get to the bottom of this before this session is over.”

Only one magician she’d seen hadn’t had eyes like that. There was still the sharpness, but every now and then the woman’s gaze would dart away briefly, or she’d wince a little at particularly deep cuts.

“I’m sorry,” she’d whispered once, hunched over so that no one else could hear her. Amara remembered the way her shoulders had trembled, how she’d forced her expression back into a hardened mask when the other magicians appeared again.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

Amara had quickly grown to resent her.

A part of her was aware that it was irrational of her to hate this magician so much, even more than the ones with icy eyes and uncaring hands, but every time Amara saw the woman, she couldn’t help but hate her for knowing that things were wrong and still refusing to do anything about it.

It didn’t matter much in the end. Amara never did say anything, would only stare at her unblinkingly, and the woman herself vanished within a few weeks. All that was left were those distant magicians who seemed to Amara more like moving statues than people, the ones who muttered words and numbers with sometimes fascination, sometimes disappointment, and sometimes an emotion she later realized was ambition.

“Of course, sir.”

—

Amara stared at the glowing lines of fiery orange and red climbing up her right arm, watching as the lights began to fade. The markings always appeared after sessions, though it was rare for her to get such an unobstructed view of them. Usually layers of bandages would obscure the patterns. They lit up the cell, and the light made it easy to ignore the scars nestled between them.

The marks drew crooked lines that broke into smaller branches, all of them snaking up her forearm like lightning. Then, on the back of her right hand, that red and orange glow would trace out numbers and words. The magicians always took care to record them. Sometimes they’d check what they were even outside of official sessions.

Amara didn’t know much about magic. She suspected that she was supposed to know more, that surely someone must have taught her about it, but those memories were just as hazy as everything else about her past.

Shuffling on the floor, Amara watched as the glow of the markings finally faded, eyes fixed on the numbers and letters just before they faded into her skin. They had changed in the facility, she knew that much. She would stare at them and know in her core that they were wrong, that they weren’t what hers should say.

Amara dropped her hand back down and looked away, not wanting to stare at those numbers any more.

AMARA

Magic Reserves: 87,409 / 110,876

Maximum Output: 17

Variability: 3

AFFINITIES

Energy: 100% Major

Motion: 50% Minor

Form: 25% Basic

Perception: 25% Basic

Emotions: 0% None

Mind: 100% Major

Time: 0% None

Probability: 0% None

—

Amara couldn’t remember how many times she’d seen someone in the cell disappear only to be replaced with a new trembling child. She’d gotten good at predicting when it would happen. Behavioral changes were usually the biggest indicator. When one of the louder kids suddenly went quiet or vice versa, usually they’d be gone by morning.

That was why, when one day James started shaking uncontrollably when he got back from his session, Amara knew. Despite usually keeping to himself, that day, he couldn’t stop thrashing around, kept saying it felt like something was crawling in his veins in a hoarse voice that Amara had never heard say so many words at once before. His thin, malnourished arms and legs jerked around in sharp, disjointed movements, and his breathing came in heavy pants. Amara and the others had to huddle on the other side of the cell just to avoid getting hit.

Just before the guards came in to take James away, Amara just barely managed to catch a glimpse of the glowing markings crawling up James’s arms in zigzagging patterns as his magic activated in uncontrolled bursts. The lights flickered between pale green and a dark, inky black. The black lingered for longer and longer up until James was dragged away, completely overtaking those faint lights. He never came back. The cold feeling rose, bubbling even more intensely, barely able to be restrained.

Amara wondered, lying awake the next night, if she missed the boy. It was hard to tell. She’d barely talked to him, after all, and she’d seen this happen far too often for it to be a surprise. Maybe she just missed having someone else around who’d been there for so long. Maybe she missed the familiarity of the same figure always huddled in the same spot, a constant in her peripheral vision. Or maybe she was just scared that she’d be next.

Still, even as the children in the cell cycled, Amara remained, now the oldest and longest lasting person in the cell.

—

It took them a long time to find a replacement for James. Usually the new child would show up within a few days, but this time, James’s little corner of the cell stayed empty. Some of the kids shuffled over and took over his old space, and no one blamed them for it.

The longer they went without a new arrival, the more uneasy Amara got. The air in the cell felt colder without another body squished inside. She would wake up at night and think that the hunched silhouettes of the sleeping children didn’t look quite right.

Then Ellie disappeared, and once again no new arrivals came. Susie took up James’s old corner, where she would sit motionless facing the wall in a warped mimicry of the boy. The kids who had started sleeping there simply moved to where she and Ellie had usually slept. Life went on.

Amara started staying up later, eyes fixed on the cell door. Ben had stopped crying by then, so it was harder to stay awake sometimes when she felt particularly exhausted, but she forced herself to do it. She felt her unease swirl and grow, rising higher and higher in sloshing waves.

And then, just before the dam could break, the cell doors swung open with a metallic creak as Amara lay awake, and a new girl stepped inside.