“Alurian’s case may be closed, but it has been suggested a familiar face will aid in her adjustment at the agency. For the time being, her education and assimilation falls within the realm of my personal responsibilities.”

~ Bek Trent, M.A.S.O

"I still remember those days,” a male voice spoke through the dime-sized earpiece in Bek’s ear as he watched Silver struggling through her second pushup. She was already on her knees.

“You’ll be working with her, Ryan,” Bek stated, and Silver glanced at him as she switched to jumping jacks. Ryan Cohen was one of the senior trainers with the MASO, and an exceedingly capable instructor of Krav Maga. He was also one of the foremost practitioners of Ghazur, an art publicly known to fewer than a hundred people in the world, and Bek knew better than to ask who he had learned it from.

“I’m looking forward to teaching a woman to kick your ass, Bek.” The voice in his ear was replaced with a chuckle that had none of the static associated with electronics. Bek cast a glance in the direction of the observation windows encircling the room. There was an entire floor above them, wrapping around the gym. No one knew about it on their first day. Everyone suspected it by their second.

“Start her at the moat,” Ryan added after a few minutes, “it won’t take much to wear her down today.”

The moat was a ditch roughly twelve-feet deep with vertical walls that were nearly impossible to scale. It was the first of several tests for magical capacity, primarily because, for most people, there was no purely physical way to escape it. Untrained magic users of mediocre capacity, roughly a level 3 on the MASO sliding scale, would usually at least end up using enough magic to be noticeable while attempting the task. That was a threshold value. If trainees were stumped by the moat, Ryan lowered the bar to test for vertex magic, which was to say moving items or objects with magic. It was the most primitive kind of magic, since it overlapped nicely with the physical world. Typically, it was the first form of magic gifted children displayed.

If that, too, proved useless, he generally resorted to surprising people into believing they were in mortal danger. Even the weakest magic user would use magic to defend their lives, usually for no greater purpose than increasing the speed of a dodge or deflecting a small weapon. If Silver had really never revealed any magical tendencies by eighteen, it was unfortunately likely she had very little capacity for magic, or her gifts fell into a category that did not physically test well…there were relatively few abilities like that, but some people just had a knack for things like psychometry.

“You can stop,” Bek said, approaching Silver as she dropped her hands to her knees and tried to catch her breath. A few hacking coughs revealed the damage the fire had wrought on her lungs. Ryan commented on that unhappily as the two of them approached the moat. Silver took the steps on one side to get in, and then stood staring up the rubber walls apprehensively.

“There’s no way anyone can climb this,” she said after a few seconds, glancing back up at him. Bek nodded slowly.

“You’re not going to try?”

“I’m already sore enough without falling on my butt a few more times.”

“Then I’ll show you.” He jumped down beside her, paused for a few seconds as he called the magic into his legs, and then leapt up the wall. With magic, it was not easy, but it was not impossible either. At the top, he stared down at her and folded his arms. Silver eyed him, and then the wall, before muttering, “still impossible.”

“Will you try if I give you a hand,” he asked, reaching down over the wall. Silver looked mildly surprised.

“You can do that? I thought this was for my baseline or whatever,” she said. She actually surprised him when she backed up and took a running leap at the wall, reaching for his arm. Of course, she missed and landed on her butt with a hiss, but it was a surprisingly gutsy attempt.

“I don’t see much room for progress here,” Ryan spoke into his ear, “unless you sensed something there.”

“Nothing,” Bek said softly. Silver was standing up tentatively, rubbing her left hip.

“I would have expected at least a flicker of power before she hit the ground like that, but the sensors didn’t pick up anything. It was a solid fall.” Ryan fell silent, clearly thinking. “Switch to combat. Surprise her a few times. I’ll be watching closely. Tell me if you sense anything.”

Bek knew the drill. He taught her a few simple techniques, explained that he wanted to test her ability to react, and then made the most obvious, straightforward attacks he could. Silver sidestepped the first few alright, but quickly grew flustered. That was, in fact, the point. But after half an hour of frustration and bruises, she had not so much as hinted at deflection with magic. The only thing she had managed to do was catch him once in the forearm with her heel.

“What is it with women and their feet?” Ryan asked, “We’ll have to teach her a few kicks soon so she doesn’t break her foot. Sense anything?” Bek was silent. “Then it’s time. Drop in three, two—”

Bek threw her, knocking her flat on her back. Silver stared up in surprise.

“One.”

There was a knife in his other hand, and no way for Silver to know it was a stage knife spelled to look real. The worst it could do was give her a bruise if she managed to catch the blunt end of the handle. Aiming for the face was usually sufficient to draw out a reaction if there was going to be one.

And it turned out, there was.

He sensed it in the fraction of a second before he felt it, soon enough to shield himself with his magic just in case. It was for the best that he did, because he was thrown backwards a solid foot, and the knife flew out of his hand and immediately burst into flame. It continued to burn, flames licking at the plastic handle on the mat, as he pushed himself to his feet.

“Now that’s what I’m talking about!” Ryan exclaimed from upstairs, “But she’s going to be one of the tricky ones – that spike was too brief to show up on our sensors as more than a blip.”

“Then that’s our baseline,” Bek said, glancing from the knife to Silver. She had paled considerably.

“I did that,” she said, staring at him. At least she recognized it. That was sometimes more than he could ask for, initially.

“You did that,” he agreed. It took only the smallest of magics to put out the fire on the knife, but he left it where it had fallen. The assessment was about more than readings; Ryan would be planning to scan the knife for magical residue, and run some calculations based on how far Bek, and the knife, had been thrown. The results could be compared with blood samples from the hospital, painting at least a fuzzy picture of where on the scales Silver lay. Bek would explain it all to her soon enough.

“I should have a formal assessment in the next two hours,” Ryan informed him. “Take her for some food before she passes out. I don’t like the sound of that cough.”

“Done,” Bek said, rising to his feet. Silver pushed herself stiffly up as well.

“Who have you been talking to this whole time?” she croaked, as if to hide her obvious discomfort with the knife. When Bek started towards the door to leave, she trailed immediately behind him. He noticed she pointedly avoided looking back even once.

“That would be your future personal trainer, Ryan. He works with most of us on self-defense, and eventually on combat training. Most likely, you’ll also be working with Cynthia, but she was elsewhere today.”

“Oh,” Silver seemed satisfied with his answer, or at least did not have the energy to ask more questions about it. When he suggested food, however, she perked up enough to complain, “Without a shower? I’m going to freeze once my sweat starts to dry. Give me fifteen minutes. Fifteen, and I’ll be at the elevator,” she held up one hand as if to emphasize her point, and when he did not say anything to stop her, walked quickly in the direction of the exit. He supposed he could trust her to get to her own room again.

“Ryan,” he prompted. The device in his ear warmed as Ryan answered.

“Yeah?”

“How was that blip?”

“Pretty darn impressive. But I’ll be honest with you, Bek - it doesn’t mean much. We’ll see if the results of the rest of our tests add up. I’m concerned about her situation. It’s rare to see someone who discovers their power so late and ever displays much talent…based on that alone, I would have guessed she’ll never be particularly strong. The spike here…it’s strange, to be honest. Most people have a sustained output, at least for a few seconds. You’re familiar with the concept of “grade off” – magic levels typically have a grade up period with a nice, smooth, exponential curve, and then a smooth grade off before they hit baseline. This is nothing like that.”

“Natural elemental users are rare,” Bek observed, referring to the fact that the knife had burst into flame. Ryan chuckled. “We only have a handful here, and you’re the only one I’ve had the privilege of working with extensively. It’s been over a decade since I met a natural-born pyromancer. It’s too bad we didn’t have these computers fifty, sixty years ago. There’s no good data for pyromancers to compare this to. But we did have tests of a sort, and Cynthia would be the first to tell you elementals have always tested differently. I might even check in with Jack.”

“Do that,” Bek agreed. “His power is also atypical.”

“Atypical,” Ryan repeated with a nearly audible nod, “that’s the word for it. I’ll get back to you in a bit.”

Bek lost no time making his way back to his own room, expression impassive but thoughts too numerous to count. Ryan had not been the first to suggest seeking Jack Weiss’s advice; he had already considered it several times himself, though not strictly because of Silver.

He barely glanced at his door before it opened to him. Silver would learn that magic eventually. It closed under its own power as well, and he immediately crossed to the single, twin bed that dominated the room. Reaching down, he slid the black box he had retrieved from the ruins of Silver’s home out from under the bed, and settled with it at his desk chair.

Cleaning had revealed very little change in the singularly indestructible material of the box. What it had revealed was a slick and glossy wooden surface, dark enough that staring too long at it gave the impression of staring into a void. There was a crease where the box might open, and above that a series of flowing flowers engraved directly into the wood. There were scratches, somehow, despite the fact that nothing he had tried had so much as buffed the polish on the wood. There was also, apparently, no way to open the box.

Unthinking, he slid his fingers over the carved flowers again before blowing softly through his nose to relieve his frustration, and then tipping the box sideways. It clinked promisingly, but he had long since grown immune to its taunts. Just as with Silver, it would not reveal its secrets so easily.

And that was why he had considered Weiss. A simple engineer, Weiss was a transfer from the UK branch that had immigrated to the US eleven years before to further his research in instant transport and time manipulation. He was a magic user with a skill that turned heads but proved elusive even to the greatest minds in the world; a man with the ability to teleport around the world. Strange that Weiss’s research had centered not around his abilities, but around an ancient castle nestled in the heart of the very woods where the northwestern branch of the MASO resided. Weiss was the kind of man who could have been extraordinary if he had put his mind to it. Instead, he was nearly forgotten.

A few more weeks, maybe, Bek would try his hand at the mysterious box. Then he would take it to the engineer, along with the Book of Lineage, and see if Weiss would have better luck. If all else failed, they might bring it to Silver, but…it was unlikely she knew anything about a magical box buried in the ruins of her home.