"—and he has to be cheating, I know it." Finnian suspended his pasta-laden fork in midair, glaring. "It's not possible to fly that fast without dirty tricks. Especially on a school broom!"
It was the next day, and he, Cassander and Elaine were sitting together at their favorite lunch table. He hadn't seen the new guy since yesterday—Hikaru Hiyama, he'd learned his name was—but that didn't mean he had calmed down about this in any way.
"Okay, okay, we get it," Elaine said good-naturedly, taking a sip of her coffee. Finnian had been told that mundane schools were known for their terrible lunches, but thanks to a mixture of magic and money, St. Lucia's offered everything the heart desired. "He defeated you, and now you're obsessed with him."
Finnian dropped his fork. "I'm not obsessed," he said sharply, careful to keep his voice down to avoid others overhearing. "I have a position to lose. In case you forgot, I used to be our champion before that guy just…waltzed in and acted like he owned the place!"
"I don't know, my guy," Cassander remarked, pushing aside his empty lunch plate and digging into his triple-chocolate cupcake, or Sugary Atrocity as Finnian liked to call it. "You have been talking about nothing but him all day."
Finnian scoffed. "Obviously," he said. "If I don't figure out a way to stop him, he's going to take my spot on the team!"
"I don't think there's any shame in that, to be honest," Elaine remarked, setting down her empty cup. "I've looked him up. He's a really big deal. Won a ton of huge titles in Asia and everything."
Finnian shot her a glare. "Anything I can use against him?"
Elaine shook her head.
"Then I couldn't care less."
"I mean, it's only for a year," Cassander tried to reassure him. "After that he goes back home, and you've learned a lot from him. Is it really so bad to lose to one of the fastest flyers in our generation?"
Still glaring, Finnian crossed his arms. "My dad doesn't care who I lose to," he said. "He just cares if I win."
Cassander and Elaine exchanged a glance, and Finnian knew that they understood, mostly. Not completely, of course; neither of them was the only heir to the Fulbright family, and the pressure and expectations were more spread out between the two of them. Finnian, meanwhile, had no siblings and neither did his father; if he failed as an heir, the Day estate would have to go to a distant cousin he barely knew.
It didn't bother him most of the time, not really. It was simply part of his world: something he had always known, always understood. Of course it limited his options sometimes. But it also came with the status and privilege, and the luxuries of his life were well worth the struggles.
Falling silent, he let his gaze roam. Hikaru Hiyama wasn't eating with the others from the flying team, but Finnian had no doubts that he would join the team soon. He only hoped that he would figure out the secret to this guy's speed quickly, or else the upcoming school year would be a nightmare.
He had almost allowed himself to relax when his eyes landed on a lone figure sitting at an otherwise empty table at the very back of the cafeteria. And sure enough, it was the exchange student, eating his lunch alone without looking at anyone, his ears covered by a large pair of bright red headphones.
Eating lunch alone. Pathetic. Finnian bit back a smirk, swallowing the urge to get up and taunt him about that. Looked like the other students didn't want to spend time with him either; maybe he had ignored them a little too much, been a little too rude to them, just like he had been with Finnian.
"By the way," Elaine said, still looking at her phone. "Have you seen that essay from the Dark Mage activist?"
Finnian snapped out of his thoughts. "The what?" he asked, just as Cassander rolled his eyes and licked the remaining cupcake crumbs off his fingers.
Instead of an explanation Elaine held out her phone towards him. "It's been all over the web today," she said. "Can you believe people from our side are agreeing with it?"
Finnian frowned at the screen. I Won't Quit Fighting, And Here's Why, the headline read, by Georgiana DeVille. He almost sneered. The DeVilles were Dark Mage nobility; they had been fighting against the Light Mages for as long as they existed. Further proof, really, that this whole anti-separation movement was nothing but a front for a Dark Mage takeover.
All the same, curiosity got the better of him, and he read.
When I was little, my best friend used to be the books in my father's library.
Up until high school I was homeschooled, and I read many things I probably shouldn't have touched until I was much, much older. There were books full of spells, history books, novels. I read books about many, many subjects, by many authors, in many styles. But they all had something in common.
What they all shared was the shadow of our centuries of being hunted.
Light Mages can choose to learn in detail about the witch hunts and the thousands of innocent mage and mundane lives they claimed. Dark Mages do not have the privilege of choosing. From childhood the reality of our lives is shaped by that history, the time we spent in hiding and the centuries of research and knowledge we lost. I was barely a middle schooler when I understood that, and so I did what most people would do in my position: I started to hate the Light Mages and everything connected to them.
Then I met Mercury and Raoul.
Mercury and Raoul are both Twilit Mages. Half of them was Dark like me, but the other half was Light, and to fourteen-year-old me that was enough to see them as the enemy. Almost everyone in the Dark community thought that way: that they were spies, that they weren't Dark enough and wanted to destroy our safe corner of the world. But their actions didn't match that idea. I got to know them and discovered they were just like me—unwelcome in the Light Mage world, closer to the hunted side than the one of the hunters.
But they are also living proof that Light and Dark Mages can share their lives and not be enemies. Their families show me, over and over, that the past doesn't have to define how we move into the future. Once upon a time, strict separation was progress. Today it holds people back from opportunities, knowledge and happiness, not to mention it fails people like Mercury and Raoul: people who aren't fully part of one side or the other and couldn't even be legally taught magic until a very few years ago.
Finnian stopped reading.
"This is so dramatic," he said, handing the phone back to Elaine. "Of course it holds people back—Dark Mages. What do we get from letting them in? All they'd do is mooch off our hard work!"
"Tell me about it," Elaine replied with a roll of her eyes. "It's noble that people want to make up for the past and all that, but it's self-sabotage. No one would profit if we let them in, not even the Dark Mages."
Finnian nodded. His father had said the same thing just today at breakfast, and he knew it was true. His father was the smartest, most reasonable man he knew, and he had never been wrong or unfair about something of this magnitude.
He couldn't be wrong about something like this. So obviously it had to be true.
"Anyway," Cassander spoke up, "have you started on that alchemy assignment yet? I can't believe we got one on the first day of school."
The conversation drifted away from current events again. Finnian relaxed, grateful to his best friend for steering it out of uncomfortable waters. It wasn't that Cassander didn't care for any of this; he knew he was keeping up just as well as his sister, but he had never liked talking about it much. Months ago, when the Let Us In movement had first risen to the surface, he had told him it always led to arguments within the family that he'd rather avoid.
Finnian was glad, honestly, that his own family was so small and so normal.
~ ~ ~
Hikaru got up from his lunch table and returned his empty tray, still wearing his headphones when a hand waved in front of his face.
He blinked, and for a second he considered ignoring it; but it didn't look like it belonged to that immature person from the flying grounds yesterday, and he still needed friends here. So, hesitantly, he took off his headphones and turned. "Yes?"
The person who had waved at him was a tiny, tiny girl. Which was not to say she was a child; she looked about Hikaru's age, but where Hikaru was already shorter than many of his new male classmates, she was still an entire head smaller than him. Indeed, Hikaru thought, the only large thing about her was her improbably long chestnut-brown ponytail, which was only a few shades darker than her skin. But despite her small height he knew at once not to underestimate her; there was something about her firm stance, her sharp brown eyes that radiated an aura of authority.
"I saw you sitting lunch alone," she said without bothering with a greeting. "Are you okay? I can find you some friends if you're lonely."
She was pretty straightforward, Hikaru thought, but he wasn't ungrateful. Since childhood he had always had a hard time with social hints and subtleties.
"It's okay," he said, running a finger over his headphones, now hanging around his neck. "I like to eat alone. People can be a bit noisy."
He half expected her to be offended, but she only laughed. "Okay, that's fair," she said. "Is that why you wear the headphones?"
Hikaru nodded, amazed. Not many people figured that out so quickly. "How did you know?"
"I guessed," she replied with a grin, suddenly looking a lot less intimidating. "You're new here, right? I love your accent!"
Hikaru winced a little at that. He was doing his damnedest not to have too much of a foreign accent when speaking English, but so far he had only been about half successful. If he would ever get the hang of not blurring the 'l' and 'r' sounds together was anyone's guess.
Still, that would probably be a bit rude to say, so he offered a half-smile. "Thanks."
"Your pronunciation is very good though," she continued immediately, and Hikaru wondered if his thoughts had been showing on his face. "Where did you learn to speak English like that? Are you fluent?"
She had fallen into stride next to him as they walked through the hallways, and despite her shorter legs Hikaru had to hurry to keep up. "I learned with magic," he explained. "I'm fluent, but sometimes I don't understand things."
The girl laughed again. "That's okay, you'll learn," she said. "Do you also get that thing where you need a word, but you can only remember it in the wrong language?"
Hikaru gave a nod. "You speak another language too?"
"Portuguese," she answered. "My family is Brazilian, that's why. But I'm not very good at it."
"Oh."
She snorted. "You don't have to reply anything to that," she said. "Anyway, I need to head to my locker. What's your name, by the way?"
Hikaru almost introduced himself last-name-first out of habit, then remembered that wasn't a thing people did here. "Hikaru," he said. "What's yours?"
"Hikaru," she repeated, doing a better job at pronouncing his name than most people he had met abroad so far. "Nice name! I'm Bianca. If you ever need anything, you can come to me anytime!"
"Okay," Hikaru answered, a little overwhelmed by the speed at which she carried this conversation. "Thank you."
"No problem! I'll see you at flying tryouts tomorrow, right?" She was already halfway down the hallway. "See you!"
And just like that, she was gone.
Still a little baffled, Hikaru put his headphones back on and walked to his own locker. He wasn't sure what exactly had happened just now, but if it meant he had a friend now, he figured he'd take it.
As he walked, he could sense someone's gaze on him, but he didn't turn around to face the jealous pair of gray eyes.
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